The role of a Scrum Master is to establish Scrum, and the Scrum Master is accountable for the Scrum Team’s effectiveness. Thus, it is quite tempting to ask how a Scrum Master can help improve the productivity of the development team. But, in a complex working environment like software development, productivity is often not the right measure to showcase all the complexities of software developers’ knowledge work.
In simple working environments, productivity means a ratio of output to input. The traditional idea is to know how much is achieved (output) with a given amount of resources (inputs), largely in numbers, and the focus is on maximizing the output. That’s why, in traditional project management of software development projects, stakeholders evaluate the development team’s productivity based on the lines of code. Or, even today in Agile project management, stakeholders with a traditional mindset ask for the number of story points per iteration, known as Sprint Velocity.