The scrum master is the team role responsible for ensuring the team lives agile values and principles and follows the processes and practices that the team agreed they would use. The responsibilities of this role include:
Scrum master is typically the term used to refer to this role, even by teams not explicitly following Scrum. Other terms used infrequently include iteration manager, agile coach, or team coach. In total, 261 Scrum Masters participated in this non-representative survey in the two weeks before July 5th, 2018. 19 participants chose not to provide their consent to Google processing and to store their answers. Hence their contributions were deleted, resulting in a sample size of 242 responses. Size of the Scrum Team Two-thirds of the respondents work on a Scrum team of at least seven team members. Small Scrum teams of four to five people make up less than 20% within the sample. Sprint Length The vast majority of the respondents are members of Scrum teams with a two-week sprint. (81 percent.) How much time do you spend weekly on product backlog refinement sessions? More than half of all respondents spend no more than an hour per week on product backlog refinement sessions. Given that the Scrum Guide allocates up to 10 percent of the sprint to refining the product backlog, this means to be at the low end. How much time do you spend per sprint on the sprint planning? The sprint planning is the most evenly distributed Scrum ceremony: the median value is around 75 minutes. How much time do you spend weekly on daily Scrums or standups? Unsurprisingly, given the sizes of most Scrum teams in this survey, more than 40 percent of the teams spent between 12 and 18 minutes per stand-up or daily Scrum session. On the other side of the spectrum, almost 30 percent of the teams get along with less than 5 minutes per stand-up. How much time do you spend per sprint on the sprint review?Almost half of the Scrum teams spends between 30 and 60 minutes on the sprint review. Interestingly, a fifth of the teams does not have sprint reviews or manages to get through them in less than 30 minutes. How much time do you spend per sprint on the retrospective?Half of the teams spent only 30 to 60 minutes on retrospectives per sprint, more than a third in the vicinity of 90 minutes. How much time do you spend in total per week on training or supporting individual team members? This might be surprising to some, considering a Scrum Master role is supposed to be coaching. The answers to this questions are wide-spread: more than 10 percent of all respondents spend at least 4 hours per week on coaching other team members. On the other side of the spectrum, 40 percent allocate less than an hour per week on coaching their teammates or do not do this at all. How much time do you spend in total per week to learn from books, blogs, newsletters or from other Scrum Masters, for example, in communities? Three-quarters of all Scrum Masters spend at least an hour a week on educating themselves, 30 % of them up to three hours a week. This is a very interesting result. It highlights how important constant improvement and learning is within Agile and Scrum. You should never consider you know enough or that you have mastered Scrum. Summary On average, the team's Scrum Master allocates his or her time roughly as follows, normalized to hours per week:
Common Pitfalls While having a scrum master can provide several benefits, there are also several problems that arise from improper application of the role. Those problems include:
Expected Benefits The general benefit expected from having a scrum master on a team is providing a self-organizing team with ongoing access to someone who has used agile, and scrum in particular in another setting and can help the team figure out the best way to apply it in their situation. Another expected benefit is that the scrum master is someone that can address distractions, disruptions, and obstacles so that the remainder of the team is free to focus on the work of producing output that will generate the desired outcome. The role does not generally have any actual authority. People filling this role have to lead from a position of influence, often taking a servant-leadership stance. This is why becoming an effective Scrum Master is actually very difficult. A Scrum Master CSM or PSM certification can help, constant and sustained learning is key. read more via Dzone and Scrum Alliance Comments are closed.
|