The reason why I’m writing that is because, one of the scrum master’s responsibilities is “removing impediments to the Development Team’s progress”.

I want to share with you some tips that once were shared with me by one of our clients. To loop you in a bit, client’s team and the dev team are separated by an ocean. Our development team had five people, while the client’s team only had two. It was easy for clients to become a bottleneck for us. The time difference made this problem worse.

So here is one of the best advices along those lines we’ve seen recently from a client:

“It’s very important for all of you to stay unblocked as much as possible. To help accomplish this, there are certain things that all of you can do. I wanted to write down a few of these so you can keep them in mind. When you feel like you are blocked, please go through the steps below and make sure you’ve tried all of them first, before reaching out for help. You can feel free to communicate with us as you find and work through problems, or switch to another task if you have others, but please don’t stop work until you’ve tried all the available options.

Strategies for staying unblocked:

1. Spend time looking for ways to get yourself unstuck first, rather than immediately asking for help and waiting on me.
2. Ask teammates for help first. For example, if you’re working on a mobile app and you think you’ve found a backend bug, go to the backend developers to get unblocked, not to me. Or if you’re having an issue with your dev environment, try to work through it as a team first.
3. Before asking me for help, research the problem yourself and let me know exactly what the problem is and what I need to do to help.
4. Test your own code, especially on mobile apps. Every bug I’ve found could just have easily been found by someone else. Finding your own bugs helps free up stakeholders to help with other issues. Also, when you are truly blocked, it would be valuable for you to spend some time testing your teammates’ code.
5. Make sure all your code changes are accompanied by automated tests, and that colleague tests are passing (even on mobile). This reduces back-and-forth during code reviews. We can lose a lot of time if I set aside time to review code and then immediately notice that tests are missing.

Note that I’m not asking you to stop communicating to me that you have run into a problem. I still want to know what difficulties you’re running into and what you’re doing to work through them. I’m just talking about things you can do before completely stopping work and waiting on me.”

That message isn’t new, nor it is an ultimate thing every team is obligated to follow. But that is a message written by a client who has many other problems to solve. So keeping that message in mind, we continued to do our work and the feedback from the client was pleasant afterwards.