Hi everyone, new scrum master and new member to this group. I’m so glad I found this. I have a question though. Do you all think it’s important to have a deep understanding of the software development life cycle in order to be effective and successful as a scrum master? I keep getting mixed answers on this. I personally think I could benefit from understanding what’s next in the process when looking at a ticket that’s been in a certain status on Jira. I want to be able to say “ ok this is in code review today, can I expect this to be in a done status or deployed status by tomorrow.” Hopefully my question makes sense, again I’m new to a lot of this.
I’d suggest there’s some core areas where an SM brings value
– knowledge of Scrum, lean, Kanban, theory of constraints, project management, and all that stuff about how work flows is delivered,
– knowledge of the software development lifecycle in terms of a waterfall process, and agile practices/approaches such as Extreme Programming, emergent design, security and so on
– marketing knowledge, in the sense of what people value, how to communicate it to the organisation, and how to measure it, product and product adoption lifecycles, customers and all of that stuff
– business knowledge; finance, legal. sale, marketing, procurement, operations, strategy and all of that
– leadership; coaching, conflict resolution, problem solving, negotiation, psychology of teams and individuals, culture and so on
The more of these you know stuff about, the more likely it is you are going to bring value to any given team or organisation. So broadly, keep learning!
I’ve been around software development for 25+ years, and working an an agile/lean space for the last 14 years. And I’m learning new stuff in one of these areas pretty much every week.
So – my current team is in Data Warehousing, where I have never worked. Two weeks ago I discovered “DataOps” is a thing, so that’s my current study!