Scrum: A Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction

by Chris Sims

The scrum master is not—we repeat, not—the team’s boss. This is a peer position on the team, set apart by knowledge and responsibilities not rank.

What we are describing is a mindset change from “doing my job” to “doing the job.” It is also a change in focus from “what we are doing” (work) to what is getting done (results).

Unlike the traditional “post mortem,” the aim of a retrospective is never to generate a long laundry list of things that went well and things that went wrong, but to identify no more than one or two strategic changes to make in the next sprint. It’s about process improvement.