Top 10 Tips for New Scrum Masters
Top 10 Tips for New Scrum Masters
Congratulations! You have just named as Scrum Master for your team. It is exciting yet a bit scary, so to help you better cope with the changes, we’ve prepared some tips for you.
1. Stop Worrying
The first step is to stop worrying. You are going to make mistakes. You are not going to be perfect, and that is ok. None of the seasoned Scrum Masters or Agile Coaches have a perfect record of helping their teams or clients. In fact, they all have made tons of mistakes, and it is those mistakes that helped them grow. So don’t worry about those mistakes; just experiment and continue to learn and improve from your mistakes.
2. Start with Basic: Events
When you first start out as Scrum Master, if you are new, it is likely that your team will be new as well, so your first job could be to facilitate the Scrum events.
Sprint Planning: Help the Product Owner to think of a business objective before the meeting and help the Development Team and Product Owner to create the Sprint Goals together.
Daily Scrum: Make sure this short meeting happens within 15 minutes or less. Remember that problem solving can be done after the meeting. Also, make sure this meeting is by the Development Team only and have the team discuss their progress towards the Sprint Goals.
Sprint Review: This should be fairly easy, showing the working software without using slides. Also, remember to work with the Product Owner to invite stakeholders.
Sprint Retrospective: Once the team gets the idea after a few sprints, start experimenting with different format and variations:
3. Seek Help
During your journey, if you encounter problems, seek help by joining local community events and asking questions. Consider asking fellow Scrum Masters or Agile Coaches for advice. Last but not least, read books or ask online in Scrum.org forums or Linkedin groups.
Scrum: a pocket guide by Gunther Verheyen https://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Pocket-Guide-Practice-Publishing-ebook/dp/B00GY6WRTG
Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins https://www.amazon.com/Coaching-Agile-Teams-ScrumMasters-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321637704
4. Agile Tools & Techniques
At the beginning, quite unavoidably, you may need to help the team with basic agile techniques like story points or planning poker. Sometimes these techniques can be helpful, but use them with care.
https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/invest/
http://agileforall.com/new-to-agile-invest-in-good-user-stories/
http://www.richardlawrence.info/2009/10/28/patterns-for-splitting-user-stories/
http://www.richardlawrence.info/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Story-Splitting-Cheat-Sheet.pdf
https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/agile/planning-poker
5. Agile Principles & Values
While at the same time it is more important to remember the Agile Principles and Values, when you are not sure whether you are helping the team, or the team is heading the right direction, revisit the Agile Manifesto.
Individuals and interactions > processes and tools
Working software > comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration > contract negotiation
Responding to change > following a plan
If you feel the team is focusing on the left side, that’s usually a good sign.
Feel free to re-visit the principles at http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
6. Engineering Practice
Once the team is able to do basic Scrum and to create at least one working increment per sprint, then coach the Development Team to focus on quality by expanding the definition of done. These are some of the candidates the Development team can consider to add to their Definition of Done:
Unit Testing https://smartbear.com/learn/automated-testing/what-is-unit-testing/
Refactoring https://martinfowler.com/books/refactoring.html
Trunk-Based Development https://trunkbaseddevelopment.com/
Continuous Integration / Continous Deployment / Continous Delivery https://dzone.com/articles/what-is-continuous-integration-1
Feature Toggle https://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html
Coding Standard
Other DevOps tools / techniques
7. Product management
Once the Development Team is building the product right, the next area to focus on is whether we are building the right product or not. Help your Product Owner with techniques to manage the product backlog, such as introducing different ways of ordering, different ways of managing stakeholders, coming up with Product Vision and Strategy, quantifying the value, and using story mapping or impact mapping.
8. Organizational Impediments
Once you have done all the above, also remember you are not just serving the Scrum team; you are serving the whole organization, as well. Teach the whole organization what business agility is and what Scrum basics are. Help different teams to work on issues hitting multiple teams, including process, tools, cross-team coordination, code merging, headcount, multi-tasking, etc.
9. Continuous Learning and Improvement
While you as Scrum Master are helping the team, you may need to help yourself to continue to learn more about coaching and facilitation or to learn more about using other Agile techniques to help the Scrum Team. For example, you may want to learn how to use Scrum with Kanban to improve the workflow. As Scrum Master, you need to learn continuously to help the Scrum Team to continue to improve.
https://www.scrum.org/resources/suggested-reading-professional-scrum-master
https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/scrum-and-kanban-stronger-together
10. Have Fun
Lastly, have fun! You should be quite happy with what you have learned and achieved, as well as how much you have helped the team.