Scrum Master Anti-Patterns

TOOLBOX

Regarding the following tips and exercises, you will find detailed descriptions in Appendix B:

• “20 Questions from a New Scrum Master to the Scrum Team” comprises 20 questions that fit into a 60-minute timebox, from Product Backlog forensics to metrics to team challenges and technical debt.

• “20 Questions from a New Scrum Master to the Product Owner” comprises 20 questions addressing the future collaboration between the two individuals and the rest of the Scrum Team.

• “20 Questions from a New Scrum Master to the Developers” comprises 20 questions addressing the foundations of a Scrum Team’s capability to build valuable products: from technical excellence and what it takes to achieve this high proficiency level to technical debt.

• “Agile Metrics—The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” points to suitable agile metrics reflecting either a Scrum Team’s progress in becoming agile or an organization’s progress in becoming a learning organization.

• “Building Communities of Practice” helps win hearts and minds within the organization. It provides authenticity to the agile transformation—signaling that the effort is not merely another management fad.

• “How to Create a Definition of Done” details a collaborative exercise of the whole Scrum Team, probably including some of the stakeholders at a later stage, to create, inspect, and adapt a Definition of Done.

• “Meta-Retrospectives—How to Get Customers and Stakeholders Onboard” details an excellent Retrospective format to foster collaboration within the extended team, including your team’s stakeholders, to build a shared understanding of the big picture and create valuable action items.

• “Peer Recruiting” is a guide on how to hire Scrum Masters (and other agile practitioners) by including self-managing teams in the decision process.

• “Retrospectives with Distributed Teams” describes a string of Liberating Structures microstructures that distributed Scrum Teams can use to organize meaningful Retrospectives.

• “Stakeholder Communication Tactics” comprise eleven proven stakeholder communications tactics to help you not just do Agile but become agile.