Routine Practices of a Scrum Master
This blog post was co-written by Scrum Masters Evan Ostrow and Gisele Muungo, and Release Train Engineer Laura Jennings.
As Scrum Masters, we wanted to share a snapshot of the dynamic world of the Scrum Master, which captures the work of a servant leader and team facilitator who ensures that Agile practices are upheld, and the team is marching towards their sprint goals. So here is a typical day, and how we navigate through the various Scrum ceremonies in our unique experience.
Daily Team Sync: The Heartbeat of the Team
Each day begins with the Team Sync which is a Scrum ceremony where team members have an opportunity to share their progress with the team, align on the day's tasks, and identify any potential roadblocks that could impede progress. As a Scrum Master, it's crucial to be actively engaged, listening, coaching, and taking notes on work items that require follow-up and follow through to support product delivery.
Remembering that this is not a one-way street, we are careful to give the team the time they need to coordinate and work through items independently. Once team sync has concluded we open the floor to anyone who has any parking lot topics to discuss (16th minute) to ensure that teams voice any questions or concerns with the current work in progress and can coordinate paring up on stories or tasks as needed. This is a significant time for teams as there are very useful conversations that take place. Checking in with teams following the team sync can provide valuable insights into the team's progress and needs.
Keys to Backlog Refinement: Clear Stories and Active Participation
As an iteration review approaches, it is crucial that we guide the team in refining stories for the next sprint. Our role here is to support the Product Owner to ensure that stories are well prepared, and clear with the necessary requirements, acceptance criteria, estimation, and additional details to help development teams achieve the intended outcome. Encouraging our product owners to review stories ahead of time and address any unknowns, and clear prioritization ahead of backlog refinement helps the team to move more efficiently during this session.
The focus is always to get stories to meet the Definition of Ready (DoR) which sets teams up for success in initiating their work efforts. In this collaborative environment, we aim to encourage all team members' individual participation by creating a safe space for them to make their voices heard.
Having a healthy, ready-to-work backlog of items to pull into sprints is heavily reliant upon this ceremony and is key to assist with planning each sprint effectively.
Sprint/Iteration Planning: Balancing Capacity, Velocity, and Priority
Iteration planning is a linchpin for a successful sprint to hold everything together to support a successful sprint outcome which leads to value delivery. As a Scrum Master, we aim to ensure that the team has a healthy backlog to pull from, have considered the team’s current capacity, acknowledged the team’s velocity, and understood the priority of each work item.
This is also the time to confirm that stories are appropriately linked to Epics/Features, fix versions (releases), labels, and components (used to filter and query work in JIRA) are for visibility on the Jira board and to allow for clean data can be pulled or queried as needed. Before wrapping up, the team is encouraged to identify, agree to, and commit to their sprint goals, cementing their confidence in the planned work.
The Retrospective: Learning from the Past to Improve the Future
Following our Sprint Review and Demo session we like to hold the Retrospective session — a time to reflect on the previous iteration or sprint to create an opportunity for team members to connect and identify opportunities for improvement.
We fully understand that our role is to facilitate the team's discussion about what went well and what didn’t and coach them to formulate actionable items to improve the outcomes of future sprints. To get the most out of this session, we intentionally try to create a comfortable environment that encourages active engagement using games that induce laughter, a time to share personal stories and experiences, or sometimes even a relaxed, open dialogue can help teams to open and engage more fully.
We find using Mural boards (a fun and simple to use collaborative tool) helps teams to focus, engage and participate during the session. It is important for us to prepare this board in advance of the session with fresh, and interesting concepts that encourage teams to think differently about sharing feedback. It is also useful to creatively reframe the typical retrospective questions, “What Went Well”, “What Didn’t”, and “What can we do to improve?” Intentionally doing this prevents the conversation, ideas, and potential solutions from becoming stale. Teams tend to appreciate when thought and effort goes into these ceremonies.
Being a Scrum Master is not just about navigating ceremonies, but also about ensuring the team's Agile journey is fruitful, comfortable, and continuously improving. There is so much more embedded in this role and these are just a few common practices that we hope help you to better understand the ways that we routinely support our teams.
Remember, our role as SMs is primarily to, coach, facilitate and empower your team's success in every sprint. When teams experience what a value added, thoughtful, purposeful, and empathetic Servant Leadership looks like in action they almost always will be inspired to take an active role in these Agile ceremonies.
So, keep these key insights in mind, and continue powerfully leading your teams to new Agile heights!
