After three years as a Scrum Master and Agile coach, I hit a wall coaching a team that did not want to try popular Agile engineering techniques such as TDD and pair programming. I had become a Scrum Master after four years working on the business analysis and account ownership side of things and could not speak from personal experience about engineering practices. In order to get some first-hand experience and to gain a new perspective, I chose to spend a year or two as a software developer on a Scrum team.
The experience has been eye-opening. I experienced a tremendous cognitive load working with a wide array of technologies; this pulled my attention away from many of the collaborative and process-oriented activities I cared about as a Scrum Master. I was surprised to feel strong pressure to complete work quickly, cutting corners, even when the Product Owner and Scrum Master were not asking me to. When this pressure was explicit, it usually came from my fellow developers. On the other hand, there is real joy in writing code and seeing a system do something worthwhile that it wasn’t doing before. My outlook has changed tremendously and is something I want to share with anyone who works with development teams, especially Scrum Masters and other coaches. I am still enjoying my time as a developer, but I’m looking forward to returning to coaching and incorporating this experience into my approach.
