After a recent heated debate over Scrum, I realized my problem is that I think of management as a quite unnecessary and redundant activity in a fully agile team. I believe a mature Agile team does not require management or any non-technical decision making process whatsoever. To my (apparently erring) eyes it is more than obvious that the only one suitable and capable of managing a mature development team is their coach (who is the most technically competent colleague with proper communication skills). I can't imagine how a Scrum master can contribute to such a team.
I am having great difficulty realizing and understanding the value of such things in Scrum and the manager as someone who is not a veteran developer but is well skilled in planning the production cycles when a coach exists in the team. What does that even mean? How on earth can someone with no edge-skills of development manage a highly technical team? Perhaps management here means something else?
I see management as a total waste of time and a by-product of immaturity. In my understanding a mature team is fully self-managing. Apparently I'm mistaken since many great people say the contrary but I can't convince myself.
Best Answer
You're making a number of mistakes here.
The first one is assuming that a Scrum Master is a manager. They're not. They're basically an administrator-cum-facilitator. They make sure things happen on the Scrum schedule, but they don't have to tell you how to, if you're a fully-mature Agile team. It mostly just happens.
But they don't monitor the quality of your work or sign your holidays off or anything like that. Nor do they manage the product or project; that's done by other people.
The bigger mistake you're making is assuming that you can go from the situation you've described in other questions ("Developers are far from capable of doing agile programming practices at the moment. No unit tests, no pair programmings, no CI (huh? what is it?) ... you get the idea.") to "fully-mature Agile team" overnight. That's simply not possible. Forget it. Don't even try.
If overnight results is what you want, look to more structured project-management approaches. And hire some managers.
If the business wants you to be Agile, it takes time, it takes culture change. And yes, at first, when you're in the Chaotic Stage of improvement, it's going to require management. Whether that be an individual or a group, someone's going to have to make some decisions.
You need a person or group to be responsible for taking a look at the bigger picture, explaining the current situation to both the developers and the business, and explaining the options you have for improvement, figuring out what the business needs and then guiding people through it.
It's going to be a long time before you can call yourselves a fully-mature Agile team and self-manage. Most teams never get there.