Scrum Master Humor
Have you ever been on a team where the tension was so thick it felt like an earthquake could happen at any moment?
A Scrum Master in the Agile Mentors Community was experiencing this problem and decided to turn to humor to help the team get through a rough patch. She decided to consult the Community to collect Scrum Master humor that she could use for her company’s Community of Practice.
As you can imagine, we received some fun, edgy, a little weird, and definitely geeky Scrum Master (and programmer) humor!
“I am the Scrum Master. Warden of Scrum and protector of the team.”
You have to be respected when you’re carrying a sword!
“A Scrum Master, Product Owner, and an Agile Coach walk into a bar…that’s all I got!!!”
We can only imagine how this may play out. The Product Owner can’t decide which drink to order and really wants all of them. The Scrum Master gently reminds him to prioritize his top six drinks. The Agile Coach teaches the Product Owner to only choose the drink which offers the most value—or in this case alcohol content—for the money.
“‘Agile’ you keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”
This must be directed to the manager that has ordered agile chairs, agile desks and agile pencils (they are bendy after all).
“A group of DBAs walk into a bar. There is no room for them to sit together. “That’s okay,” they reply. “We can help you join some tables.”
The DBAs know how to solve every problem!
“It’s important to use MoSCoW when you prioritize your stories—you wouldn’t want to Russia into anything.”
This one must have been written by a dad because it has “dad joke” written all over it.
“How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb? None—It’s a hardware problem.”
Use caution when cross-pollinating software developers with the hardware folks!
“I called the janitor the other day to see what he could do about my dingy linoleum floor. He said he would have been happy to loan me a polisher, but that he hadn’t the slightest idea what he had done with it. I told him not to worry about it—that as a programmer it wasn’t the first time I had experienced a buffer allocation failure due to a memory error.”
For those of us over 40, failure due to a memory error is a common occurrence!
“I used to be in a rock band named 1023M. Had to disband. We never could get a gig.”
It’s hard to program when you don’t even have a gig!
“Knock, Knock. Who’s there? Carry. Carry who? Carry over to the next sprint.”
Ouch. This one kinda stings.
“Last night at an Agile Meetup, a couple of us came up with a satirical business plan: Reclaiming Your Waterfall! (The sad part is, we’ll be kicking ourselves a few years from now when someone actually tries this and makes money off it).”
Imagine a world where we go backwards to command and control leadership and following a plan at all costs—ouch!
“As a wife I want my husband to lay down the newspaper so that he can talk to me. 1,000 story points!”
User stories can and will be used against you at home.
“The dad says, ‘As your father I want you to clean up your room.’ The son says, ‘so that…..???” Make sure your user story is correctly phrased.”
Your kids will use agile to one-up you.
And we can’t complete our story about work humor without throwing in a little Dilbert:
“We’re going to try something called Agile programming. That means no more planning and no more documentation. Just start writing code and complaining. I’m glad it has a name. That was your training.”
To join the conversation or to laugh along with us at all the things teams say (and a whole lot more), join the Agile Mentors Community. Visit https://www.agilementors.com for more information on membership.