55 Scrum Master Jokes for People Who Schedule the Meetings

My scrum master asked what my blockers were. I said the same thing I said yesterday. He nodded and put it in the parking lot.

The parking lot has been at capacity since 2019.

Daily standup, day 743. What I did yesterday: meetings. What I will do today: meetings. Blockers: meetings.

The scrum master said the daily is not a status meeting. Then the director joined and asked everyone for a status.

Our retro action item from last sprint was to follow up on the retro action item from the sprint before.

The velocity went up 30 percent. Nobody shipped anything. We just changed how we estimate.

I asked the scrum master if we could skip standup. He said the ceremony is sacred. Half the team was on vacation.

The PM added four stories on Wednesday. The scrum master said the sprint is the sprint. The PM added them anyway.

Sprint planning ran two hours over. To save time, we agreed to skip the retro.

Scrum Master: any questions? Seven muted faces. One slow head shake. Someone's dog barks.

The burndown chart has not burned down since onboarding. It just sits there, flat, like a heart monitor on a corpse.

I got my CSM certification for $1,400. The team still calls everything I do project management.

We do kanban. We call it scrum. We have a sprint. The sprint never ends. The board has no columns. Everything is in progress.

The scrum master sent a calendar invite for a meeting to plan the meeting to prep for the meeting.

Let's timebox this, he said, at minute 47 of a 30 minute discussion.

Our impediment log has one entry. It says the company.

The retro is optional. Nobody comes. The scrum master writes a summary anyway. Nobody reads it.

I told the scrum master my blocker was the scrum master. He put it in the parking lot.

The team voted on story points. Three said 8. Two said 1. One said fish. We averaged it to 5.

Scrum Master: did anyone get stuck? Me, drowning since Monday: nope, all good.

We carry over five stories every sprint. We never reduce the commitment. The scrum master calls this a healthy backlog.

I asked when we would handle the technical debt. He said we'll handle that in the next sprint. He has said this for two years.

Our scrum master is also the project manager, the people manager, the OKR writer, the release coordinator, and the person who orders the team lunch. He gets paid for one of these.

I joined a standup five minutes late. They were still doing introductions.

The Jira automation rule fires every time you breathe near a ticket. Nobody knows who set it up. Nobody knows how to turn it off.

We tracked velocity for nine months. Management used it to compare teams. Now nobody estimates honestly. The velocity is great.

Scrum Master: let's parking-lot that. Me: that was the parking lot item.

My calendar on Tuesday morning is one solid block of color. Refinement. Planning. Sync. Pre-sync. Sync-the-sync.

We do a Definition of Done workshop every six months. Nothing has ever been done.

The scrum master asked the team to share their wellness on a scale of 1 to 5. Everyone said 4. The scrum master said 4. Everyone is fine.

I'll follow up offline, he said, about the third time he said I'll follow up offline.

Story refinement is on the calendar for 90 minutes. We refine one ticket. The rest of the time is people negotiating about the ticket we just refined.

The director joined the retro. The retro became very positive.

Scrum Master: this should be a 3. Developer: it touches auth. Scrum Master: let's go with 3.

We have a backlog grooming meeting. We have a refinement meeting. We have a discovery meeting. They are the same meeting. They are all on Tuesday.

The scrum master rolled out a new estimation framework. It was the old estimation framework with a new name.

I told my standup update in 12 seconds. The scrum master asked me to expand on that.

Our retro produced 14 action items. The owner of all 14 is TBD.

Scrum Master: is anyone else stuck? Silence. The kind of silence where you can hear three different people trying to unmute.

He moved the standup 15 minutes earlier so nobody would dial in late. Now everybody dials in 15 minutes earlier and late.

We hired a second scrum master because the first one was overloaded with scrum master meetings.

The scrum master asked the team to be more agile. The team asked what that meant. He put it in the parking lot.

Sprint goal: deliver value to the customer. That has been the sprint goal for 38 sprints.

He showed the team the new Jira workflow. It had 11 statuses. Two of them were called Done.

Planning poker. Six people vote 1. One person votes 5. The 5 talks for 20 minutes. The team votes again. Everyone votes 5.

We use Fibonacci. Everything is a 5. The 1 and 2 are too small to bother with. The 8 and 13 get split. So everything is a 5.

Scrum Master: what is the smallest thing we could ship? The team lists 14 things. None of them are small.

The sprint review demo broke live in front of the VP. The scrum master called it a learning opportunity. The engineer called it Tuesday.

The retro has a shout-outs segment. Nobody has contributed to shout-outs since the third sprint. It is still on the agenda.

The stakeholder shows up to every demo. He has never been to a standup. He has opinions about the demo.

I am the scrum master. I am also the only person fixing the flaky tests. These two facts are related.

The impediment removal board has 23 items. None of them have been removed. The scrum master calls it a wish list and laughs. He is the only one laughing.

Velocity dropped this sprint because one engineer took PTO. The manager wants to know what we are doing about it.

The manager called to say the team is behind. The team is not behind. The team is exactly where the team said it would be in planning. The manager was not in planning.

PM treats velocity as a commitment. Scrum master explains it is a forecast. PM nods. Next sprint, PM treats velocity as a commitment.