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Showing posts from April, 2023

Why do you need a Scrum Master?

Why do you need a Scrum Master? In today's world where every other person wants to be a Scrum Master do we really know why a Scrum Master is required. There is no doubt Scrum is the most popular and widely implemented framework. Below are my views regarding why a Scrum Master is required and an essential part of a Scrum Team. - A Scrum Master as the name suggests is supposed to be the subject matter expert as far as implementation of Scrum is concerned. - They guide the entire team including Product Owners, Developers and Stakeholders to understand the Scrum practices. - A Scrum Master is famous for wearing 8 different hats namely: Servant Leader, Facilitator, Coach, Manager, Mentor, Teacher, Impediment Remover, and Change Agent. - They are responsible for instilling the suggested Scrum values in a Scrum Team which helps differentiate between professional scrum and mechanical scrum. - They act as true servant leaders always putting the needs of their Team ahead of everything else.

Should a team be allowed to add more work to an ongoing Sprint?

Should a team be allowed to add more work to an ongoing Sprint? The main goal of a Scrum team is to deliver value with each Sprint and this can not be achieved with half-done items.  To deliver value in each Sprint a Scrum team needs to deliver potentially shippable increment(s) which meet the definition of done. Most of the times Developers are not able to finish all the work as planned and negotiate with the Product Owner to move back some work to the Product Backlog without affecting their Sprint goal. However, there are rare cases where a team feels that they are going to finish everything early or before time. Should a team be allowed to add more work to their ongoing Sprint in such cases? Just as a team is allowed to drop work if things are not going as per plan they should be allowed to add work if they feel they are going to complete their planned work before time. The work committed to during Sprint planning is just a forecast by the Developers based on their past experience/v