Real Scrum Masters (not a person who used to have the title of project manager) serve the purpose of helping the team organize who does what and taking care of any lack of clarity on the stories.
Scrum is the name that Agile receives when applied to software development. Agile is getting feedback as quickly as possible about the decisions you make. I feel that if anyone works using the alternative, waterfall, then that person is the worst engineer it can be.
Grew up in Russia, lived in the States, moved to Germany, sometimes live in Spain. I program since I was 13. I used to program games, maps and now I reverse engineer password managers and other stuff
Location
Berlin and Málaga
Education
MS in CS from State Polytechnic University of St. Petersburg
From my experience a good team keeps themselves in sync naturally. There are tickets/issues, Slack, email, old fashioned p2p talking. There weren't many stand-ups so far, where I learned something interesting or got synced up. Usually it's just a reiteration of the stuff that I already know or something I'll get to know later during the day anyway. People just say what they did or going to do. If it's interesting for me, I already know it, otherwise I don't need to hear it.
I think the team which lacks clarity in stories doesn't need a scrum master, but rather learn more about the product they are building and talk more to their teammates. You don't need an extra freeloader on the team to help with that.
Agile and waterfall are not the only alternatives. I don't have a name for it, but another approach would be a "natural organic team approach" where everyone is just getting their and common shit done, where the communication and planning happen naturally. In the right setting it just works. I've worked in the company, believe it or not, where we had about 40 people working on the product and there was not a single meeting dedicated to project management. We did have meetings, but they were extremely rare, like one in 3 months to announce something serious usually. Like a new future project, or that we're moving to a new building, but not to decide who works on which task. And in that company I and the whole company was amazingly productive, much more productive than in any other agile or process-less company I worked for before or after.
And in that company I and the whole company was amazingly productive, much more productive than in any other agile or process-less company I worked for before or after.
That is the point. You want a reproducible system to make any team productive, not leave it to chance.
Grew up in Russia, lived in the States, moved to Germany, sometimes live in Spain. I program since I was 13. I used to program games, maps and now I reverse engineer password managers and other stuff
Location
Berlin and Málaga
Education
MS in CS from State Polytechnic University of St. Petersburg
IMO introducing this type of agile process IS leaving it to chance, as it has no influence on the result. Something else has to be done to change improve things.
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Daily stand-ups serve the purpose of putting the team on sync. If your team is 3 people in size, then they are ridiculous.
Planning Poker, if done correctly serves a very important purpose as I explain here:
Explaining Scrum story points
Adrián Norte
Real Scrum Masters (not a person who used to have the title of project manager) serve the purpose of helping the team organize who does what and taking care of any lack of clarity on the stories.
Scrum is the name that Agile receives when applied to software development. Agile is getting feedback as quickly as possible about the decisions you make. I feel that if anyone works using the alternative, waterfall, then that person is the worst engineer it can be.
From my experience a good team keeps themselves in sync naturally. There are tickets/issues, Slack, email, old fashioned p2p talking. There weren't many stand-ups so far, where I learned something interesting or got synced up. Usually it's just a reiteration of the stuff that I already know or something I'll get to know later during the day anyway. People just say what they did or going to do. If it's interesting for me, I already know it, otherwise I don't need to hear it.
I think the team which lacks clarity in stories doesn't need a scrum master, but rather learn more about the product they are building and talk more to their teammates. You don't need an extra freeloader on the team to help with that.
Agile and waterfall are not the only alternatives. I don't have a name for it, but another approach would be a "natural organic team approach" where everyone is just getting their and common shit done, where the communication and planning happen naturally. In the right setting it just works. I've worked in the company, believe it or not, where we had about 40 people working on the product and there was not a single meeting dedicated to project management. We did have meetings, but they were extremely rare, like one in 3 months to announce something serious usually. Like a new future project, or that we're moving to a new building, but not to decide who works on which task. And in that company I and the whole company was amazingly productive, much more productive than in any other agile or process-less company I worked for before or after.
That is the point. You want a reproducible system to make any team productive, not leave it to chance.
IMO introducing this type of agile process IS leaving it to chance, as it has no influence on the result. Something else has to be done to change improve things.