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ScrumMasters Don’t Provide the Solutions to Problems the Team Should Solve

From Essential Scrum by Kenneth S. Rubin:

[…]the ScrumMaster observes how the team is using Scrum and does anything possible to help it get to the next level of performance. When problems arise that the team can and should be able to solve, the ScrumMaster’s attitude, like that of any good coach, is “I’m not here to solve your problems for you; instead, I’m here to help you solve your own problems.”


Do We Need a Full Time Tech Writer?

One of the perennial questions that development teams face is the struggle to staff a full time technical writer. Of course, I have an opinion on this…but I was quite stricken by Kenneth S. Rubin’s analysis of this very question in his book, Essential Scrum. He frames the discussion in the context of cost-of-delay calculations, and the difference between idle work and idle workers. Consider:
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Scrum, Idle Work, and Idle Workers

From Essential Scrum by Kenneth S. Rubin:

Idle work is work that we want to do (such as building or testing something) but can’t do because something is preventing us. […] Many product development organizations focus more on eliminating the waste of idle workers than on the waste of idle work. […] In Scrum, we are acutely aware that finding the bottlenecks in the flow of work and focusing our efforts on eliminating them is a far more economically sensible activity than trying to keep everyone 100% busy.