What is the problem?
** Should A Scrum Master Be Technical?! **
I always get this question in my Scrum.org classes. It seems there is no end to the repetition of this question. So, a few months ago, I decided to investigate this question deeply and even build a solution for it.
First, I searched a lot to understand the why behind this question. In fact, there are various reasons for it.
Imagine you are a Scrum Master without any technical background and you are in a conversation with Developers. They constantly use technical terms but you don’t understand them. Naturally, you experience these feelings:
- Feeling lost and confused
- Feeling you don’t understand them
- Feeling that you don’t know what’s going on in the team’s daily work
- Feeling that Developers don't accept you as a serious role
- Feeling like an idiot
- Feeling ignored
- Feeling that you are redundant
Feeling unworthiness and doubt
All these feelings are destructive and prevent you from being as effective as possible for your team.
You are not supposed to have deep technical knowledge, but you should understand the general concept of technical terms.
Imagine one of the Developers is saying:
The Feature branch has been merged with the Main branch.
But, what does it mean really?
To understand this routine sentence, do you need deep technical knowledge? Absolutely not.
You just need to acquire a general understanding of the source control concept. Why the team needs it? What is it? How it works? etc.
Ask yourself: If you had a basic understanding of source control terms and could immediately imagine the concept in your mind, would you feel confused anymore?
We have the same situation with other technical terms as well.
Investigation
I also searched the Internet about this question. The result is that I found many blog posts and forums. I brought some of them here:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/should-scrum-master-technical-barry-overeem/
https://www.scrum.org/forum/scrum-forum/36842/should-scrum-master-be-technical
https://www.scrum.org/forum/scrum-forum/37142/scrum-master-coding-knowledge
https://bigpicture.one/blog/should-scrum-master-have-technical-knowledge/
https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/yds-does-scrum-master-need-technical-skills
https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/i-am-torn-should-scrum-master-be-technical-or-not
https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/should-scrum-masters-be-technical
Let me share some of the answers from these blog posts:
“They have to have enough understanding of the technical work the developers do to be able to ask relevant questions and coach the team.”
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“I encourage all the Scrum Masters I work with to be as technical as they can comfortably be.”
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"Of course a solid awareness of what I'll broadly call XP practices is essential so I can guide the team to explore these."
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“They do need to have a sound understanding of the agile process and a general understanding of the technicalities of the industry to become successful servant leaders.”
The common denominator of all answers is:
Scrum Masters do not need to have deep and strong technical knowledge, but they should have a basic general understanding of technical terms.
Solution
Now another question arises for Scrum Masters:
How can I learn a basic and general understanding of technical terms without going deep into every single term?
I searched a lot to find various answers to this valid question. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a vivid concrete solution for it.
What I found was:
- Reading books
- Searching the Internet / Watching YouTube
- Participating in some technical classes
- ...
So, I decided to build a solution for it which is a video course named "10 Day Understand Developers". You can see it here:
https://www.lernee.com/10-day-understand-developers
Get started and level up yourself to understand your Developers’ daily language.