No One on My Team Knows Scrum

Fixing Your Scrum — Pragmatic Programmers (48 / 114)

👈 Chapter 7 Embracing the Scrum Master Role | TOC | Help! I’m the Impediment 👉

A Scrum master is a teacher. Part of the role is to ensure that Scrum is well-understood and enacted by the Scrum team. Want a quick way to test whether your teaching efforts have been successful? At the end of your next daily scrum, ask the dev team if they can draw the Scrum framework on a whiteboard and explain the Scrum roles, artifacts, and events.

If that seems like a big ask, try something simpler. Ask your team who has read the latest version of The Scrum Guide. Over the past five years, we’ve yet to find a team where every team member can answer “yes” the first time we ask that question. We ourselves might have answered “no” to this question many years ago, when we were development team members.

When you teach Scrum, you need the skills to present the Scrum framework in a compelling and engaging way. Do you have tools and techniques that allow your students to participate actively in the learning? We encourage you to use every drawing in this book with your teams to teach the Scrum framework in an interactive way.

Remember the Scrum diagram we showed you in Chapter 1? It’s great for visualizing Scrum. But sometimes it can be helpful to do team exercises with an unlabeled version of that diagram, like this:

For example, try writing the Scrum roles, events, and artifacts on a single color of sticky notes. Ask your team to place any sticky note they choose on the diagram and discuss an important fact about the item they put on the board. Once the first person has shared their fact, elaborate further on the selected sticky note and provide additional insights and context. As team members place more notes on the board, discuss how those roles, events, and artifacts are related.

Don’t immediately correct wrong answers. In fact, don’t touch a single sticky note during the entire exercise. Hold the space. See if someone else will help out. If the team needs a cue, ask if something might be out of place.

This exercise helps your team get its first taste of self-organization and team learning. Don’t take that away from them. You…

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