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Agile Development: How to Become a Qualified Scrum Master?
10-13 minutes
There are three main roles in Scrum agile development :
- Product Owner (PO) ;
- Scrum Master ;
- Development Team .
3 Scrum Roles Among them, Scrum Master is one of its important roles. So today we will discuss how to become a qualified Scrum Master.
What is a Scrum Master?
The Scrum Master is considered a project manager in many project developments, which is actually a misunderstanding. At the same time, I often see people who advocate the complete distinction between the Scrum Master and the project manager. I don’t agree with this. In my opinion, although Scrum Master is not a project manager, it still has many project manager functions. So what is the responsibility of the Scrum Master? What can we do to become a qualified Scrum Master?
What is Scrum Master The following six aspects are listed for your reference:
Manage the Scrum process
This is the core responsibility of the Scrum Master and the primary responsibility of the Scrum Master that differentiates it from the project manager is that: the Scrum Master needs to maintain the process of each sprint and ensure the Team adhere to the values and best practices, so that the project can be successfully implemented and completed.
First, the Scrum Master is responsible for hosting each meeting during a Sprint, including sprint planning meeting , daily scrum meeting , sprint review meeting , and sprint retrospective meeting .
In addition, Scrum Master needs to help the Product Owner establishes product backlog and sprint backlog , and establish the priority of each of these stories through on-going backlog grooming sessions.
Finally, the Scrum Master also needs to help scrum team clears the obstacles encountered during the development process. The Scrum Master should have a block list to record the problem barriers that Team encountered during development, namely the impediment log. It is managed by the Scrum Master itself and eventually each problem in the list is processed in a timely manner.
Protect the Team
The Scrum Master should protect the Team to the maximum extent possible to ensure that the Team is not disturbed by the outside world, especially the Product Owner. So how does the Scrum Master protect the Team? Under what circumstances does scrum team need protection?
Scrum master protecting team
- Avoid Over Commitment
At the beginning of each sprint, the Scrum Master should reasonably commit to the workload based on the Team’s ability and past experience. Don’t blindly and optimistically promise the Product Owner for committing too much of work. Some Scrum Masters may not be able to estimate the ability of the Team, or hope to get the good impression of the boss by overcommitting too much of work, resulting in the Team’s continuous overtime to meet the target of the sprint. The efficiency of the Team is seriously reduced. At the same time, due to the rush of time and rush to deliver, the quality of the project was very low, and eventually a vicious circle was looped.
- Balanced Workload
A good Scrum Master should know how to “swing” with the Product Owner to get a reasonable workload at this time. The “swing” here is not passive idle work, or intentionally reducing the workload of Team, but to arrange a reasonable workload to enable the Team to achieve maximum efficiency, while not harming Team’s initiative. This is a virtuous circle.
- Avoid External Disturbance
We all know that changes in requirements are nightmares for every developer, and one of the important reasons for the emergence of agile is to solve this problem and let developers embrace changes. However, you can often encounter that the Product Owner crossing the Scrum Master, directly find the Team and give them orders. At this point, Scrum Master should protect the Team to avoid distraction of work currently doing bythe Team. Change in requirements is alright, but it should not interfere with the Team in the sprint process. It can be proposed on daily scrum meeting or sprint plan meeting to negotiate solutions. I think Scrum Master should have a “calf-guarding” spirit for the Team at all times.
- Effective communication
Many times Scrum Master acts as a bridge between the stakeholder (boss, Product Owner) and the development team. It’s easy to make people feel that Scrum Master is trying to survive in the cracks, and it’s easy to not bother. Therefore, the importance of communication art is self-evident. How to convince the Product Owner, make the boss satisfied, and let Development Team happy, this is a learning process to acquire such skill.
