A good Scrum Master can always fill the time with valuable work. But it’s still common to work part-time Scrum Master and part-time something else, typically as developer. Which one should we use? Instead of long reasonings, I very shortly list the considerations I would take to decide.
- Do they have one or more development teams? – It’s common that a Scrum Master of one team is also part of the team as a developer, while the ones who have more, are full time Scrum Masters. It’s not only because it obviously takes more time to work with more teams, but if you are a developer in one of them, you will end up being involved more with one and less with the other.
- Maturity of the team – if Scrum is new to the team, or they are struggling with it, it takes more time to teach, coach and mentor, or just facilitate discussions. In these cases there is bigger value in having a full time Scrum Master. But in a team where people know what to do, share the same values and have a good understanding of agile and Scrum, you can lean back a bit and put some (or most) of your time to other type of work.
- Workload – this is the most controversial topic. If there is a huge pressure to deliver functionality, people tend to concentrate less on the framework and more on the low-level coding. One could argue that the purpose of the Scrum framework is to keep the team efficient, so I would say in hard times a good Scrum Master is needed more than any other time. It’s true though that a huge portion of Scrum Masters would hurt more in these times than help, so it might be a good idea for them to code instead. It’s also true that there are some nice to have practices that the Scrum Master can do in peaceful times but shouldn’t do under pressure, like teaching and exploring things in general when they are not directly needed.
These are only the first 3 considerations I would make, but every situation is different and there is no silver bullet to answer the question. If you need advice, contact me!