Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process (Shawn Kahl's Library)

The daily scrum is a core Scrum practice. If you don’t do it, you aren’t doing Scrum. During the daily scrum each team member updates and synchronizes with all other team members to get a shared picture of the full scope of work. But when the daily scrum starts, which person should provide his update first? Scrum doesn’t define this. Each team will have its own approach.

To say, “I have finally achieved agility!” is a meaningless comment. As Mike Cohn nicely summarized, “Agile is not something you become, it’s something you become more of” (Cohn 2010). There is no end state that you can call agile or Scrum. Instead, becoming more proficient with Scrum and more agile is a process of continuous, never-ending improvement aimed at improving your bottom line.

You won’t be agile for very long if you don’t start automating your tests.

In the case of SR4U, the goal is to very quickly (and cost-effectively) get feedback by getting an initial version of the review learning and filtering capabilities up and running so that people can start using the service. If the team learns after early feedback that the filtered results are not considered by the target user base to be substantially better than the unfiltered results, the company might invest more time in trying to improve the filtering algorithm. However, if after reasonable assets have been invested the company still isn’t able to obtain a measurably better set of filtered results, it might be time to pivot and either terminate this product or consider a different direction in which to proceed that leverages the learning to date.

Table 13.3 shows that these traditional project manager responsibilities are distributed among the various Scrum team roles and possibly other managers.
Table 13.3. Mapping of Project Management Responsibilities in a Scrum Organization

Based on Table 13.3, a person who was a project manager might assume any of the three Scrum roles, depending on that person’s skills and desire. Many project managers make excellent ScrumMasters, if they can forgo any command-and-control management tendencies.

First, I would expect Fred’s teammates to discuss the situation with him with the goal of trying to help him and the team. If they are unsuccessful, the ScrumMaster, as Scrum team coach, would work with Fred to help him be a more effective team member. If coaching doesn’t work, Fred’s situation would most likely escalate out of the Scrum team to his resource manager (the person to whom Fred reports within the organization), because the ScrumMaster does not have hiring and firing authority.

The currency of agile is the team. In fact, one of the core values of the Agile Manifesto is “Individuals and Interactions.” In other words, the team is the valuable asset.

Because ScrumMasters prefer not to give out answers, they need to be patient, giving teams time to arrive at appropriate answers on their own. At times it is hard for me to be a ScrumMaster because I see the issue the team is dealing with and I “know” the answer. Well, at least I think I know the answer! It is arrogant for me (or any ScrumMaster) to believe that I am smarter than the collective intelligence of the team. So, at times I just have to bite my tongue and be patient, letting the team work out the solution, periodically asking probing questions to help guide things along.

The ScrumMaster is the Scrum team’s process authority. In this capacity, the ScrumMaster is empowered to ensure that the Scrum team enacts and adheres to the Scrum values, principles, and practices along with the Scrum team’s specific approaches. The ScrumMaster continuously helps the Scrum team improve the process, whenever possible, to maximize delivered business value.
Authority in this context is not the same type of authority that a functional manager or project manager would have. For example, the ScrumMaster doesn’t hire and fire and cannot dictate to the team what tasks it should do or how to do them. The ScrumMaster also is not responsible for making sure the work gets done. Instead, the ScrumMaster helps the team define and adhere to its own process for making sure the work gets done.

The ScrumMaster is often described as a servant leader of the Scrum team. Even when acting as the team’s coach, the ScrumMaster is first and foremost a servant to the Scrum team, ensuring that its highest-priority needs are being met. A servant leader would never ask, “So, what are you going to do for me today?” Instead, a servant leader asks, “So, what can I do today to help you and the team be more effective?”