Joep Schuurkes (Posts about scrum)

The five areas of Agile

Joep Schuurkes — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 23:00:00 GMT

In a previous post I claimed that any set of principles (or methodology for that matter) for good software development should cover these five areas:

collaboration
software engineering
work management
product
reflect & experiment

I mentioned these five again in my post "What is a scrum master?", but that's all I've said about them. That changes with this post. I will provide a brief description for each of the five areas. I'll share some ideas how a list of the five areas of Agile might be useful. And I'll reflect on the question: Are they the five areas of good software development or of Agile software development?

Two short checklists for Scrum

Joep Schuurkes — Wed, 08 May 2024 22:00:00 GMT

checklist no.1

Do you add acceptance criteria and story points to each ticket before planning?
Do you have daily team meetings where people provide updates on their progress?
After each iteration, do you report to stakeholders what work was done and what will be planned next?

checklist no.2

Is the team protected during the sprint from stakeholders trying to interfere?
Is a sprint focused on achieving a goal and is how that goal is achieved, left sufficiently open?
Does the team address impediments as soon as they are discovered?

Old-school Scrum was rad!

Joep Schuurkes — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 23:00:00 GMT

In 2001, nine years before the first version of the Scrum Guide, Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle published "Agile Software Development with Scrum". This version of Scrum has some remarkable differences from even the first version of the Scrum Guide.

The three things that struck me most about this version of Scrum, were

Scrum Master is a management role, preferably by an engineer
there is no retrospective, impediments are addressed in the Daily Scrum
Sprints are 30 days and have a goal, tasks can be added and removed throughout

While I don't want to claim we should return to this old-school version of Scrum, I do appreciate how radical it is compared to how software development is done - even today.

Scrum master or scrum mascot?

Joep Schuurkes — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 11:17:40 GMT

During our latest monthly call, Maaret Pyhäjärvi and I spent some of our time discussing agency, accountability and scrum masters. At one point I said something along the lines of:

Scrum masters often end up as scrum mascots.

Maaret said I should write a blog post about scrum mascots¹, so here we are.

According to the 2020 Scrum Guide a Scrum Master² is accountable for two things:

"establishing Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide".
"the Scrum Team's effectiveness".

Accountability implies (or rather: should imply) corresponding authority. You're being held accountable for certain outcomes *and* you have sufficient power to influence those outcomes. That's a scrum master. A scrum mascot is a very different beast: they have neither power nor accountability. And yet that seems to be what a lot of organizations (and scrum masters?) want.

What is a scrum master?

Joep Schuurkes — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 12:04:40 GMT

Recently I applied to two scrum master jobs and it got me thinking: what is a scrum master? What is it exactly that they do?

What made this question even more pertinent to me (apart from the job applications) is that in the past I have been a scrum master. But that was five years ago and none of my jobs since had much involvement of a scrum master. And my experiences of those past five years made me wonder: where exactly does a scrum master fit in?

A scrum master is the Scrum boss

The 2020 Scrum Guide says:

The Scrum Master is accountable for establishing Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide. They do this by helping everyone understand Scrum theory and practice, both within the Scrum Team and the organization.

"Tester" is an overloaded variable

Joep Schuurkes — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 09:39:25 GMT

Yesterday I came across a post on LinkedIn explaining why there are no testers in Scrum¹. What struck me most about the post was the amount of work the word "tester" was doing. In one sentence it meant one thing (a role in a team), in the next sentence something else (a step in the process), and so on. Hence the title of this post: the word "tester" was being used as an overloaded variable. So let's do some unpacking.

Testers to people management

"Having a tester" means that there are people with the official title of "tester" or "QA engineer" or whatever within the company. For the purposes of people management², there's a distinction between this role and the other roles in the company. This allows for more specific expectations about the role, for different career paths and salary scales, etc.