A serious matter of debate has been out there for a while. Mostly in the Agile confines.
Whether a Scrum Master should have a technical background or not? In this video, we will
be discussing this question in detail. A Scrum Master need not necessarily be technical,
but being a Scrum Master with a technical background is an added advantage. A Scrum
Master is not a team member, but a team coach. A technical coach plays a key role in successful
Agile adoption and in identifying possibilities to implement its usage to maximum effect.
A Scrum Master with technical skills can involve in the software development activities successfully
by understanding it from a technical perspective. A technical Scrum Master:
Is capable of building rapport between the teams and team members
Knows very well how and when to ask tech-savvy questions and
Has the acumen to find out if something is not right
It is helpful for a Scrum Master to have basic technical skills in order to communicate with
the technical team properly. It can help the Scrum Master develop reliability among other
senior management. But a technical Scrum master can also affect
the team negatively when he or she Acts as a technical subject matter expert
and try to handle services Forces the team to adopt and use a particular
technology Guide the team on how to disintegrate stories
into tasks Guide the Product Owner on how to evaluate
the work` And try to handle the project that the team
is working on Both the team and the organization should
understand what a Technical Scrum Master is doing and when he/she is doing something which
shouldn’t be done by him.
It is not a demand that a Scrum Master should be technical, but it is essential for a Scrum
Master to have excellent communication and management skills. The main role of a Scrum
Master is to assist the team to follow the processes properly and the team is completely
responsible for the enhancement of its technical practices.
A Scrum Master with a lack of technical skills is free from resolving technical problems
and delivering technical services while helping the team in finding the communication and
collaboration issues and tackling non-technical impediments. A Scrum Master with his/her intelligence
would be able to ask thought-provoking and direct questions which would resolve the barriers.
A Scrum Master need not necessarily know the domain details that the team members are working
within. This is because, everyone is responsible to do certain work, such as:
The Product Owner is responsible for having knowledge on what needs to be done
The development team is responsible for identifying how to execute this in a better way
The Scrum Master is responsible for enabling them to do what they need to do
But this doesn’t mean that there are no shortcomings of a non-technical scrum master.
An experienced Technical Scrum Master follows up with the team and helps them execute the
task. But a scrum master without technical skills may fail in this area.
When the architect is busy with the other technical assessments, that is where a Technical
Scrum Master can help to fill the gaps but a non-technical one cannot.
A Technical Scrum Master, sometimes, especially when the team extremely requires time out
from the user stories, could update the program on his/her machine, run unit tests, fix the
bugs, and finally ask the testing team to check them once. You will not find this ability
in a non-technical scrum master. So should a scrum master be technical?
A Scrum Master is not required to understand the code, but coaching new teams requires
some amount of technical excellence. Technical skills help the Scrum coach to teach and guide
the team properly in understanding the practices well.
A Scrum Master does not need to be technical at all. He/she should understand the fundamental
concepts of software development and be clear about the work process of IT projects. The
most essential skill of Scrum Master is to guide the Product Owner and the team on the
Scrum Practices and help the team in increasing productivity. It does not entail anything
pertaining to technical and coding skills. So this was our discussion on whether a scrum
master should have technical knowledge or not. We hope that you liked our video. Please
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