The main objective of a team lead is to help the members of the team in any way possible to solve their problems. The natural inclination of organizations I have been part of during an agile adoption is to make the team lead the Scrum Master. This has “worked” in the past but now I feel we never practiced Scrum to its full potential. During my most recent agile transformation at Indigo, it is seeing two very dedicated professional Scrum Masters practice their defined role that I truly have seen the true impact and benefits of scrum.

The Scrum Master is a servant leader whose main responsibility is to maintain the focus on the team to help deliver its goal and facilitating the many ceremonies involved with scrum. Many organization start with this role definition and believes this can be a “part-time” role considering the rituals doesn’t take the entire work day and how many blockers are there that needs resolving anyways? In my experience, this is probably the wrong mindset since the positive impacts Scrum Masters provide transcends a typical work day and improves the overall product, people culture, and process. …

This is a multi-part series to talk about our evolving engineering practice at Indigo after we have scaled our team and transition to an agile feature based team.

Agile teams are self-organizing with the full capabilities to complete a feature in their backlog. This is accomplished, in part, with code review. Code review helps our developers learn the code base, as well as help them learn new technologies and techniques that grow their skill sets which is a fundamental pillar at Indigo Digital.

Code Review, is the act of consciously and systematically convening with one’s fellow programmers to check each other’s code for mistakes, and has been repeatedly shown to accelerate and streamline the process of software development like few other practices can. …