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Does maximum velocity mean maximum productivity? Absolutely not. In an attempt to maximize velocity, a team may in fact achieve the opposite. If asked to maximize velocity, a team may skimp on unit or acceptance testing, reduce customer collaboration, skip fixing bugs, minimize refactoring, or many other key benefits of the various Agile development practices. While potentially offering short-term improvement (if you can call it that), there will be a negative long-term impact. The goal is not maximized velocity, but rather optimal velocity over time, which takes into account many factors including the quality of the end product.

So if they needed the ScrumMaster role filled, then this was something they were prepared to train and assign to either a project manager or possibly a technical lead. The consensus of this team was, if you found a project manager skilled enough to have a real technical dialog with the development team, then this person could be trained and perform the ScrumMaster role.

The Scrum Alliance published a survey that has some supporting evidence. Over 60% of the 1100 people that responded to the survey had nine or more years of industry experience, 15% of them had twenty or more years of experience, and 35% had Masters degrees. Also, of the people who responded, 22% were project managers and another 21% were either Managers or Directors. So my simple translation is that practicing ScrumMasters are managers (project or other) with significant (10+) years of proven experience. Training and assigning this role to experienced project managers or software development managers seems like a viable approach to have the responsibility filled and having a dedicated ScrumMaster separate from these roles may not be necessary.