Renaming “Master” in “Scrum Master”?

During the Black Lives Matter movement, the “tech community” debated whether the “master” branch (in terms of source control) should be renamed to “main” or similar. This was then adopted by GitHub as the new default.

Recently, I wondered if the same debate was had for “Scrum Master” in terms of Agile Development. The “Scrum Master” is a responsibility to organise the Agile meetings such as the Daily Scrum aka Daily Standup. The scrum nomenclature was adapted from Rugby.

I found a thread on scrum.org which argued for and against, but the community definitely settled on keeping the name. The difference between a “master” code branch, and a Scrum “master” is that the Scrum Master is about mastery, and not a master/slave relationship. So it’s the same word but different meaning and origin.

Thank you for your input and we will pass it forward to Ken and Jeff. Please remember as Ken and Jeff have always said, the role of Scrum Master is one of Scrum mastery and not in any way related to being the owner of the team as the team is self-organizing and self managed. Scrum Master a role and not a job title taken from the ideas of the master carpenter which dates back thousands of years. GitHub on the other hand literally used Master and Slave meaning that one controlled the other.
That said, a lot of things are always being discussed and considered and your courage to bring this forward is greatly appreciated.
Eric Naiburg

I’m sometimes embarrassed to tell people what I do because of how arrogant or self-important I think my job title and role make me sound. Whether one agrees the name should be changed or not, public opinion on the word “Master” exacerbates this problem.
Simon Mayer

Piotr Górajek calls people out for virtue signalling.

I will put here a little different perspective. IMHO this is ridiculous to push for change words only for the sake of pushing for it. How do you come to an idea that one word, put out of its’ context, should be changed because of “racism connotations”? Each word have a lot of meanings
Piotr Górajek

The word master is clearly a person that masters the framework, a coach, a person that has a mastery or “expertise” on something. With this line of thinking why we do not rename the Master degrees from Universities? MSc titles should be renamed as well?
Alexander Leanza Bøhnsdalen

There’s a good amount of sense in what Alan Eustace says

I wanted to observe a couple of things.
It seems like most, if not all of us, engaging in this conversation, are white. On what basis can we evaluate the impact of the terms we’re discussing?
Changing terms/language alone will not eradicate systemic and institutional racism. And yet language and symbols are powerful.
Language changes over time to accommodate shifts in cultural sensibilities. There are plenty of examples of this.
Personally, as I mentioned above, even before recent world events, I have disliked the term “Scrum Master” for some time. I have not found it helpful, and continually have had to explain what is, and what is not, intended by the word “master”.
Alan Eustace

“Organizations choosing not to respond to #BLM in a productive way will cause negative perceptions ranging from being perceived as tone-deaf (best case); indifferent to institutional bias; or racist (worst case).”
Phil Bryant

I’m not sure on Phil Bryant’s view. It defintiely seems like virtue signalling, and I’d say it’s quite tone-deaf changing things that don’t need to be changed and drawing attention away from the real issues. People are protesting against police brutality and we are trying to rename Scrum Master into Scrum Facilitator or something.

Now consider a team with a white Scrum Master. Every day, the members will hear their leader referred to as their Scrum “Master” – unless we make a change. As Agile practitioners, “We value responding to change over following a plan.”
Phil Bryant

Now consider a team with a non-white Scrum master. WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO ABOUT THAT PHIL!?

The problem with choosing another word is that many other words can also have some kind of offence if you really study them. Sean Hoegaarden says

Scrum Wizard will be a problem for the same reason as Master (KKK), Scrum Captain too (slave trade ships), Scrum Samurai is obviously cultural appropriation, the Scrum Alchemist has antisemitic reminiscences… I hope we will not end up with something like an Agile Clown…
Sean Hoegaarden

Can I suggest we go to the home of where the terminology “Scrum” came from – i.e. Rugby.
The key role in a Rugby Scrum is the “Scrum-Half” for example.
Mohamed Hesham Jurangpathy

Sorry, but if someone starts calling me a Scrum Hooker instead of a Scrum Master I’m not only going to be offended, but probably initiate some fisticuffs!
René Gysenbergs

In conclusion, if the name is deemed inappropriate or irrelevant by the community (and we need non-white people to be part of the decision, rather than white folk just virtue-signalling), then the Scrum community can look to change it. However, deciding on a new name that doesn’t involve cultural appropriation or cause any other offence – seems harder than first thought.

Country Sales

Different departments across the business have been doing presentations to give other departments visibility of what they do. I think it’s a good idea, because as a Software Developer, I only hear the likes of Support and Deployment mentioned occasionally, but there are other departments like Sales, Marketing, Finance and sometimes it’s difficult to know where the responsibility lies with some aspects, especially when there’s teams within those departments with different responsibilities.

A recent presentation was by “Country Sales” and I still don’t know much about them.

Q Why is the team called “Country Sales”? I assume it doesn’t mean you’re all in waxed jackets, tweed flat caps and wellies.

A: “I think it’s just that we cover the whole country (we used to be North and South). We now cover England, Wales & Northern Ireland.“

The thing is, we also do business in Scotland, and islands like Isle of Man and Jersey, so not sure who covers them then.

Even more confusion arose when someone said “we have an allocated area of the country where we work closely with customers“. So that sounds like they are assigned to a region, like a county, and not a country. Big difference there.

So now we have determined that Country Sales is just a fancy, and confusing name for a Sales, let’s attempt to understand what job roles are involved.

It seemed most people had a job role of Account Director. Director sounds like some massively important job, but then there were Junior Account Directors too so I imagine it’s just a standard job with a very pretentious title.

“we work with both current and non-customers and offer a range of solutions to fulfil their needs”

Is that another pretentious statement? What’s a non-customer? Surely if they engage in a sale then they are instantly a customer?

What skills are involved in the Account Director role?

build and maintain a rapport, and to understand roadmaps
self confidence in the product and yourself
active listening to understand customer needs
wealth of knowledge of the solutions
point of contact for queries and customer escalations

“You do not need a sales background for this role”
Account Director

Surely you do need a sales background, or you will start as a Junior. So this sounds like a pointless statement, unless you really can go in on a bigger wage without knowing how to sell?

“anyone with a role within the company can potentially sell the solutions. The majority of staff are more able than me in terms of solution knowledge”
Technical Architect for Sales

That’s going on his end of year review. Weird how you’d think it would be a skilled role and require charisma, and then he reckons anyone can do his job, and do it better than he can. It sounds like you can even become an Architect without actually knowing how to sell.

One of the questions at the end from the audience was:

Q: What are the reasons for losing business?

“I have my own suggestions, but I’ll pass this over to John. As someone who is new in the role, do you have a different viewpoint on this?”

Surely the experienced person should be able to give a detailed answer, and he never even told us what his “suggestion” was after John had given his opinion.

“Despite my haggard appearance, I am the baby of the group”
John

The new guy, John said this:

When the software doesn’t do what they need it to do.
They are currently on a different “sales framework” (whatever that means)
Pricing – but he made out it was if it costs us too much to deploy it to them rather than our software being overpriced to them

My suggestion: what about bugs in software, our reputation etc. Surely these aspects would cause potential customers to look elsewhere, or existing customers leave. Conversely a very positive reputation would naturally draw in customers and make sales easier.

Technology Vision Statement

At the start of the year, we were presented the “Technology Vision Statement” for 2022 by our CTO. Since we are around half-way through the year, I thought I’d revisit and critique it.

“The year 2022 will be the year of delivering cloud-ready, higher quality software at a faster pace. Our data will be integrated across products and be accessible via standard interfaces and we will begin a common user experience across our settings. Our business transformation will continue with SAFe, nurturing our talent management and the introduction of DevOps.“
Technology Vision Statement

So picking out keywords from this statement – are we on target for achieving this?

Cloud: Some teams are on projects involving “the cloud” but some of the projects are very basic and not exciting to the users. One project involves migrating a single column from a single database table into cloud storage. That’s right, one single column. The user won’t see any difference, it’s just some internal benefits but I think it has been a few months work.

Faster Pace: I completed a project back in January and I think we are planning on releasing it at the start of July. We are releasing software at the slowest we have ever done.

Data accessible via standard interfaces: I don’t know what this refers to. It sounds like we are implementing some amazing API that can work across all of our products.

SAFe: This is the Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise. Most teams are working in this way, but my team isn’t.

Nurturing Our Talent Management: I think recruitment has been minimal and I think we have lost more than we have recruited.

Introduction of DevOps: We already had “DevOps”. I suppose we have improved the test environment pipelines so this might be the closest we have got to achieving this vision statement.

“Our people are valued, empowered and trusted. We are inclusive, authentic and thrive on our shared success.”

We were then shown a “hype cycle“. There wasn’t much explanation on this and I’d never come across this terminology before.

It looked pretty identical to this graph that I stole from the internet.

will m :
O less than 2 0 2 5 years
.5 to years
A ' O years

It had loads of products/features along a graph but the labels don’t exactly give a positive view on them. Are you hyped for a product that releases during the “Peak of Inflated Expectations“, or the “Trough of Disillusionment“. Maybe I need to read more into what this means.

Another similarity was that our graph had a lot of similar jargon-based features. Many that I didn’t think we would release, and I haven’t heard anything about these projects either such as: “Assisted Robots”, “Application Marketplace”, “Consumer Wearables”. Given the labels have products that are up to 10 years, I suppose they could just be conceptual ideas of where we want to be headed.

We then were shown a list of objectives under different categories which aim to “deliver the strategic vision“. Many are repeats from the vision statement, but then there’s added buzzwords and ideas like “innovation“, “increase efficiency“, “control costs“, “implement tech strategy“, and “implement agile coaching team“.

Shoes 2

It’s hard to believe this is my second blog on the topic of shoes – when this is a software development blog.

I recently discovered the BBC Archive channel which shows clips from back in the day. This one is from 1987 for “Smart Trainers”.

It’s interesting how they were trying to make products like this 35 years ago. I don’t think it’s very practical for outside use though, I wouldn’t trust it in water. It’s probably just designed for gym use only.

It’s funny how he doesn’t successfully demo it. I did wonder if it was just taking a long time to load and he didn’t have time, or if the program had legitimately frozen. Either way, the product didn’t seem very appealing. Wearable tech such as wristbands seem much more practical than Smart Trainers.

For Star Wars fans, I also liked this interview with Carrie Fisher and Mark Hammill