With the popularity of Scrum, ScrumMaster has become a de facto role on many agile projects.

In this thought-provoking session, we’ll explore the ScrumMaster role and its key challenges. We’ll discuss why teams end up with dysfunctional ScrumMasters, and how that hurts agile projects. We’ll explore common ScrumMaster anti-patterns, and why they occur. We’ll challenge the ScrumMaster role, compare it to other models, and address if agile teams really need a ScrumMaster.

This promises to be a lively and interactive session that may change your views on how to structure a Scrum team.

Agile coaches attempt to influence teams in different ways. Our experience is that agile coaches typically work by instinct and intuition. This makes it very hard to explain what coaches do and difficult to teach people how to coach agile teams. Richard Hackman claims in his book “Leading Teams” that there a three basic types of coaching intervention: Motivational, Consultative, Educational. We want to test out that theory and explore about what Agile Coaches really do. We aim to uncover specific coaching interventions that participants have tried and whether these interventions helped.