Why people with testing experiences become successful Scrum Masters

I have many years of experience in software testing. In these years, I have always been a member of a Scrum team. In the later years I became a Scrum Master for an amazing development team in one of the largest Norwegian IT companies. The Agile way of working was always my passion. To be a part of the transformation for a team from Waterfall to Agile was a huge experience.

What I want to share on my post this time is how to use my tester strength in the Scrum Master role and what are the advantages?

The Scrum Master role was supporting/facilitating the teams towards the agile way of working. First of all, I supported to work more transparently to create good overview over the product backlog. This helped to make plans for the team in the near future. I used this advantage also to support the Product Owner to plan the backlog refinement and also to run the sprint planning with the team.

With the Tester mindset, I was also able to contribute content wise for example to define the acceptance criteria for each user story, or on the estimation. I was able to define, how much time we need to test for each user story, who can test, what can be automated and if any test data needs to be ordered in advance.

An additional advantage was to see what kind of work needs to be done for existing test automations because of the new functions and/or adjustments on released functionalities.

As a tester I had a good technical understanding of the product and other integrated applications. This helped enormously for communication and alignment with developers, stakeholders and the additional testers. This collaboration skill of the Scrum Master helps to remove impediments for the team. In addition it was easier to create and facilitate the Retrospectives with a high value outcome and fit for purpose for the team by using my deeper knowledge as a Tester and living the role of a Scrum Master with a tester background.