A scrum master was one of the most useless people I’ve ever worked with. Not a product or project manager because they didn’t know the domain. Didn’t know all that much about building software because they didn’t have any skills. Devs were still writing and moving tickets around so they basically did zero productive work.
When this is done, probably after the next fad takes hold, I want a grim and thorough post-mortem of Agile, from its naive utopian vision to the various parasites the ecosystem attracted, down to the disillusionment and tears. I want names and I want shame. I want the nasty cultist tendencies exposed for everyone to see and hopefully (ha!) learn from. Perhaps not post-mortem, perhaps vivisection, so that a mirror could be held up to the abdominal cavity so that Agile could at last see the teratomas lurking inside of it since shortly after its conception, before the whole thing flickers out.
The kindest interpretation one could offer is that it was a starry-eyed conception of how programming teams could constantly kick the blame-ball back to the stakeholders, as if the routine assignment of fault were somehow reasonable and rational in organizations, which it is not. At its worst, it looked like a solid grift, something that would last for several years as long as you kept smiling and promising.
{thing} is something we can pay money for, without making real changes or learning new information, to tell investors and competitors we're part of {new fad}
Big-A Agile (as marketed, certified, and hired for) is that for little-a agile (the manifesto and cultural practice). It also describes most consultant trends.
The root of it is the realization that nobody in positions of power wants to change or admit they don't know something. Highly structured Agile implementations promise to deliver agile without requiring either of those things of anyone in power, which is why they're CTO-down driven: hire for new roles, nod when report are presented, and pat each other on the back at how progressive your company is.
It's management attempting to feign involvement at a lower level, without really putting in the effort to do so productively.
My team was forced to invite a scrum master to several planning meetings. She sat quietly, observed the process, and then a few weeks later disappeared without a trace. We didn’t get any feedback from her or the org. Still not sure what that was about.
This can actually be an unfair characterization: my company required some developers, who tended to be the stronger technical leaders, become certified scrum masters for their respective teams. Is hate to lose them all
