Why Do Scrum Masters Get Paid so Much?
10K- by Mukundan Bashyam
- 10th May, 2019
- Last updated on 21st May, 2019
- 9 mins read
Is Scrum Master the best paying job? Do Scrum Masters are highly paid individuals? Though these two questions look very simple in asking but are very difficult in answering. Let’s dig in and find out the salary range that Scrum Masters are earning.
The survey conducted by ‘Age of Product’ (Stephen Wolpers and Sumit Mehta) in 2017, included Scrum Masters from 13 countries around the world. The salary of a Certified Scrum Master varies from country to country.
Collated below are the salary ranges in USD for three important countries:
US: 100,001 – 125,000
UK: 60,001 - 70,000
India: 20,001 – 30,000
The monthly income of a Certified Scrum Master can be listed as follows-
US: 8333 – 10416
UK: 5000 – 5833
India: 1667 - 2500
The weekly income of a Certified Scrum Master, assuming 52 weeks for a year, the certified scrum master makes the following salary (in USD):
US: 1923 – 2403
UK: 1154 – 1346
India: 384 - 577
The hourly salary of Certified Scrum Master (CSM) makes the following(in USD):
US: 48 – 60
UK: 29 – 34
India: 9.6 – 14
Note: The figures mentioned here are in USD.
Additional compensations for this job
The certified scrum master can get additional compensations if he/she can take up a training for the community or get further certified in the line of his/her career.
Salaries by company
Here are some of the average salaries paid by the top companies to the certified Scrum Masters:
- TCS: 11,11,500/year
- IBM: 16,07,000/year
- Amdocs: 14,00,000/year
- JP Morgan: 16,52,000/year
- Philips: 19,96,000/year
![CSM salaries by top companies]()
Why do scrum masters get paid so much?
According to Glassdoor, it is one of the 25 highest paying jobs in America.
In an era in which software is constantly being updated and flying out the door, the ability to keep everyone connected and communicating, face to face if possible, is critical. A breakdown in communications leads to a breakdown in software. And a breakdown in software leads to a breakdown of the business.
As companies are moving more to Agile, they have realized that scrum master is the core and important role in making the team productive, self -organized and follow the practices of Agile diligently.
Job Description for certified scrum master
Below are the on-job responsibilities of the Certified Scrum Master (CSM):
Essential Duties:
Guiding the team and organization on how to use Agile/Scrum practices and values to delight customers.
Guiding the team on how to get the most of out of self-organization.
Guiding the team on self-organizing to fill in the intentional gaps left in the Agile/Scrum frameworks.
Assessing the Scrum Maturity of the team and organization and coaching the team to higher levels of maturity, at a pace that is sustainable and comfortable for the team and organization.
Removing impediments or guiding the team to remove impediments by finding the right personnel to remove the impediment.
Building a trusting and safe environment where problems can be raised without fear of blame, retribution, or being judged, with an emphasis on healing and problem-solving.
Facilitating getting the work done without coercion, assigning, or dictating the work.
Facilitating discussion, decision making, and conflict resolution.
Assisting with internal and external communication, improving transparency, and radiating information.
Supporting and educating the Product Owner, especially on grooming and maintaining the product backlog.
Providing all support to the team using a servant leadership style whenever possible, and leading by example.
Required Skills/Experience:
Experience in playing the Scrum Master role for at least one year for a software development team that was diligently applying Scrum principles, practices, and theory. (Adjust based on your necessity)
Good skills and knowledge of servant leadership, facilitation, situational awareness, conflict resolution, continual improvement, empowerment, and increasing transparency.
Knowledge of various well-documented patterns and techniques for filling in the intentional gaps left in the Scrum approach(example: numerous Burndown technologies, various Retrospective formats, handling bugs, etc.).
Preferred Skills/Experience (Any of these is a plus):
Experience is playing the Scrum Master role for at least two years for a software development team that was diligently applying Scrum principles, practices, and theory. (Adjust based on your necessity)
Knowledge of other Agile approaches: XP, Kanban, Crystal, FDD, etc.
Awareness and experience with widely successful Agile techniques: User Stories, ATDD, TDD, Continuous Integration, Continuous Testing, Pairing, Automated Testing, Agile Games.
Applicable knowledge of the technologies used by the team.
The experience in applying a wide variety of well-documented patterns and techniques for filling in the intentional gaps left in the Scrum approach (example: various Burndown technologies, many Retrospective formats, handling bugs, etc.).
Excellent communication and mentoring skills.
Tasks of the Certified Scrum Master
Helping the Development Team to create high-value products
Coaching the Development Team in self-organization and cross-functionality
Removing impediments to the Development Team’s progress
Facilitating Scrum events as requested or needed
Coaching the Development Team in organizational environments in which Scrum is not yet fully adopted and understood
Ensuring that goals, scope, and product domain are understood by everyone on the Scrum Team as well as possible
Finding techniques for effective Product Backlog management
Helping the Scrum Team understand the need for clear and concise Product Backlog items
Understanding product planning in an empirical environment
Ensuring the Product Owner knows how to arrange the Product Backlog to maximize the value
Facilitating Scrum events as requested or needed
Companies that prefer Certified Scrum Master
According to the Scrum Guides, “Scrum has been adopted by a vast amount of software development companies around the world.”
Scrum has been used in education, manufacturing, marketing, operations, and other fields. If you have the skills in dealing with conflicts and you are an experienced facilitator, then following are the top companies in the world that hire the skilled Scrum Masters like you. According to the latest data on Glassdoor, the top companies preferring Scrum Master are:
Answer Financial Inc. – Encino, CA
Pegasystems – Cambridge, MA
Donnelley Financial Solutions – Glen Mills, PA
IntraEdge – Phoenix, AZ
Wipro Limited, Bengaluru
Zensar Technologies Limited, Hyderabad
JP Morgan Chase, Hyderabad
Barclays – Pune
Orange, Mumbai
Fiserv – Pune, and many more
It is more surprising that the Scrum Master salaries have increased in such a short span of time. Moreover, being a Scrum Master is not an easy role as it requires more of a servant leadership skills. So, the aim of the Scrum Master is always to finish-up the project in time without compromising the quality.
Climb-up the ladder of Scrum with Scrum interview questions and answers! Find here.
Mukundan Bashyam
Mukundan Bashyam has more than 15 years of IT experience working in different roles such as Agile Coach, Scrum Master, and Product Owner. He is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP), Certified Scrum Master(CSM) and Certified Agile Coach from ICAgile. He is an accomplished Agile trainer for many organizations and a contributing author for KnowledgeHut. Mukundan has a Bachelor’s degree from Indian Institute of Technology (BHU)-Varanasi and a Master’s degree in Industrial Management from National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), Mumbai. He has worked with startups and large companies like Hewlett Packard(HP), Target Corporation India, Diageo, and Robert Bosch.
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By Mukundan Bashyam
What is Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®️)?The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®️) helps businesses address the significant challenges of developing and delivering enterprise-class software and systems in the shortest sustainable lead time. It is an online, freely revealed knowledge base of proven success patterns for implementing Lean-Agile software and systems at enterprise scale.Developed in the field, SAFe®️ draws from three primary bodies of knowledge: Agile development, systems thinking, and Lean product development. It synchronizes alignment, collaboration, and delivery for large numbers of Agile teams. Scalable and configurable, SAFe®️ allows each organization to adapt it to its own business needs. It supports smaller-scale solutions employing 50–125 practitioners, as well as complex systems that require thousands of people. Why use SAFe®️ ?SAFe®️ combines the power of Agile with systems thinking and Lean product development. It synchronizes alignment, collaboration, and delivery for multiple Agile teams. As a result, SAFe®️ provides dramatic improvements to business agility, including productivity, time to market, quality, and employee engagement, and more.SAFe®️ is improving business outcomes for companies of all sizes across the world. It has produced dramatic increases in time to market, employee engagement, higher quality, higher customer satisfaction, and overall improved economic outcomes. It also helps create cultures that are more productive, rewarding, and fun.QualityBuilt-In Quality practices increase customer satisfaction and provide faster and more predictable value delivery. They also improve the ability to innovate. Without quality, the Lean goal of the maximum value in the shortest sustainable lead time cannot be achieved. ProductivityWhen productivity increases, system development economics improves, as does employee engagement. For team members, productivity is a critical, personal need. Everyone feels better when they’re contributing more and doing less wasteful work.Employee EngagementAccording to the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM), employees with the highest level of commitment perform 21 percent better and are 65 percent less likely to leave the organization. Clearly, employee engagement is directly linked to business performance.Faster Time to MarketLean-Agile frameworks allow businesses to deliver value to the market more quickly. Companies that adopt Agile development practices routinely gain first-mover advantages and enjoy the higher gross margins afforded to market leaders. 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Together, the Team and Program Levels form an organizational structure called the Agile Release Train (ART), where Agile teams, key stakeholders, and other resources are dedicated to an important, ongoing solution mission.Large Solution SAFe®️The Large Solution SAFe®️ configuration is for developing the largest and most complex solutions that typically require multiple Agile release trains and Suppliers, but do not require portfolio-level considerations. The Solution Train organizational construct of the Large Solution Level helps enterprises that face the biggest challenges—building large-scale, multidisciplinary software, hardware, and complex IT systems. Building these solutions requires additional roles, artifacts, events, and coordination. Portfolio SAFe®️The Portfolio SAFe®️ configuration helps align portfolio execution to the enterprise strategy, by organizing Agile development around the flow of value, through one or more value streams. It provides business agility through principles and practices for portfolio strategy and investment funding, Agile portfolio operations, and Lean governance. Full SAFe®️The Full SAFe®️ configuration is the most comprehensive version of the Framework. It supports enterprises that build and maintain large integrated solutions, which require hundreds of people or more and includes all levels of SAFe®️: team, program, large solution, and portfolio. In the largest enterprises, multiple instances of various SAFe®️ configurations may be required. Scaled agile framework core values - SAFe®️ SAFe®️ is broad and deep and based on both Lean and Agile principles as its foundation.Importance of core valuesCore values are the fundamental beliefs of a person or organization.The core values are the guiding principles that speak behavior and action.Core values can help people to know what is right from wrong.It helps companies to determine whether they are working on the right path or not.SAFe®️ upholds four Core Values: alignment, built-in quality, transparency, and program execution, as illustrated in Figure below and described in the following sections.1. AlignmentAlignment ensures that many people act as one unit or team, all pulling in the same direction. Alignment in SAFe®️ is achieved when everyone in the portfolio, and every team member on every ART, understand the strategy and the part they play in achieving it.SAFe®️ delivers alignment by orchestrating strategic themes, vision, roadmap, and PI planning. Economic prioritization and the visible flow of work through the various Kanban systems and backlogs provide visibility and transparency.2.Built-in QualityBuilt-in quality is one of the important core values of SAFe®️. The enterprise’s ability to deliver new functionality with the fastest sustainable lead time and to be able to react to rapidly changing business environments is dependent on solution quality. But built-in quality is not unique to SAFe®️. Rather, it is a core principle of the Lean-Agile mindset, where it helps avoid the cost of delays associated with recall, rework, and defect fixing. The Agile Manifesto is focused on quality as well: “Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.”The following sections summarize recommended practices for achieving built-in quality.SoftwareSAFe®️’s software quality practices—many of which are inspired by Extreme Programming (XP)— help Agile software teams ensure that the solutions they build are high quality and adaptable to change. The collaborative nature of these practices, along with a focus on frequent validation, creates an emergent culture in which engineering and craftsmanship are key business enablers. Test-Driven DevelopmentTest-Driven Development (TDD) is a philosophy and practice that recommends building and executing tests before implementing the code or a component of a system. By validating them against a series of agreed-to tests, TDD—an Agile Testing practice—improves system outcomes by assuring that the system implementation meets its requirements. TDD, along with Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), is part of the ‘test-first’ approach to Build Quality into development. Writing tests first creates a more balanced testing portfolio with many fast, automated development tests and fewer slow, manual, end-to-end tests. Acceptance Test Driven DevelopmentAcceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) is a practice in which the whole team collaboratively discusses acceptance criteria, with examples, and then distills them into a set of concrete acceptance tests before development begins. It’s the best way to ensure that all have the same shared understanding of what it is we are building. It’s also the best way to ensure we have a shared definition of Done.Behavior-Driven DevelopmentBehavior Driven Development (BDD) is a Test-First, Agile Testing practice that provides Built-In Quality by defining (and potentially automating) tests before, or as part of, specifying system behavior. BDD is a collaborative process that creates a shared understanding of requirements between the business and the Development Team. Its goal is to help guide development, decrease rework, and increase flow. Without focusing on internal implementation, BDD tests are business-facing scenarios that attempt to describe the behavior of a Story, Feature, or Capability from a user’s perspective. When automated, these tests ensure that the system continuously meets the specified behavior even as the system evolves. That, in turn, enables Release on Demand. Automated BDD tests can also serve as the definitive statement regarding the as-built system behavior, replacing other forms of behavioral specifications.Continuous IntegrationThis is the practice of merging the code from each developer’s workspace into a single main branch of code, multiple times per day. This lessens the risk of deferred integration issues and their impact on system quality and program predictability. Teams perform local integration at least daily. But to confirm that the work is progressing as intended, full system-level integration should be achieved at least one or two times per iteration.RefactoringRefactoring is “a disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior.” A key enabler of emergent design, refactoring is essential to Agile. To maintain system robustness, teams continuously refactor code in a series of small steps, providing a solid foundation for future development.Pair WorkSome teams follow pair programming, but that may be too extreme for many. More generally, pair work may couple developers and testers on a story. Still, others prefer more spontaneous pairing, with developers collaborating for critical code segments, refactoring of legacy code, development of interface definition, and system-level integration challenges.HardwareHardware quality is supported by exploratory early iterations, frequent system-level integration, design verification, modeling, and set-based design. The Agile architecture supports software and hardware quality.1.System IntegrationDifferent components and subsystems—software, firmware, hardware, and everything else—must collaborate to provide effective solution-level behaviors. Practices that support solution-level quality include:Frequent system and solution-level integrationSolution-level testing of functional and Nonfunctional RequirementsSystem and Solution Demos2.ComplianceSAFe®️ enterprises that build high assurance systems define their approved practices, policies, and procedures in a Lean Quality Management System (QMS). These systems are intended to ensure that development activities and outcomes comply with all relevant regulations and quality standards, as well as providing the required documentation to prove it.3.TransparencyTransparency builds trust. Trust, in turn, is essential for performance, innovation, risk-taking, and relentless improvement. Trust exists when the business and development can confidently rely on another to act with integrity, particularly in times of difficulty. Without trust no one can build high-performance teams and programs, nor build (or rebuild) the confidence needed to make and meet reasonable commitments. And without trust, working environments are a lot less fun and motivating.Here are few SAFe®️ practices which enable trust:ARTs have visibility into the team’s backlogs, as well as other Program Backlogs.Teams and programs commit to short-term, visible commitments that they routinely meet4. Program ExecutionSAFe®️ places an intense focus on working systems and business outcomes. History shows us that while many enterprises start the transformation with individual Agile teams, they often become frustrated as even those teams struggle to deliver more substantial amounts of solution value, reliably and efficiently. That is the purpose of the ART, and that is why SAFe®️ focuses implementation initially at the Program Level. In turn, the ability of Value Streams to deliver value depends on the ability of the ARTs and Solution Trains.ConclusionThe four Core Values of alignment, built-in quality, transparency, and program execution represent the fundamental beliefs that are key to SAFe®️ effectiveness. These guiding principles help dictate behavior and action for everyone who participates in a SAFe®️ portfolio. Successful teams and programs implementing SAFe®️ have aligned their organizations along these core values and getting many benefits—employee engagement, productivity, quality, and time to market.
- by Mukundan Bashyam
- 13 Dec 2018
- 7 mins read
What is Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®️)?The Sca... Read More
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