Scrum Slaves

Radical Summary: A lot of scrum masters are actually scrum slaves — religiously following the scrum scriptures, but unable to fix team issues and enhance the software development process. Those, who can help teams enhance don’t need scrum for this.

Elaboration

With the advent of agile/scrum certification many people and organisations turned to cargo-cults of Scrum: all rituals are followed, everything is done by the book, team issues are never resolved.

• Retrospectives are held, but “hot” topics are avoided.
• Peace is prioritised over issue resolution.
• Unfinished tickets are kicked down to the next sprint

The attention of the team led by a scrum slave is continuously drawn to “following the right Scrum” vs. enhancing the process itself. Typical symptoms include:

• Short retrospectives (~1 hour) where no in-depth conversation about recurring issues is possible. It’s just not enough time to retrospect, analyse, dig to the bottom of the problem. In short retros only shallow discussions and observations take place.
• Conflicts are not resolved, as “respect” value is usually implemented as “conflict avoidance”.
• Unfinished work is routinely passed to the next sprint. Sprint commitment is not taken seriously.
• The Scrum master drives the conversation back to the Scrum book.