Scrum Master certification for manual tester? Boon or not?

Question

I have learnt that a Scrum Master is the one who facilitates the continuous improvement process during a Sprint retrospective.

From my experience, the retrospective leads to improve the (testing) process itself, depending on the need of the team.

That said, is it beneficial for a manual tester to go for Scrum Master certification?

I understand, that it is always good to learn new things, new methodologies, but can a manual tester be a Scrum Master?

I found a similar question on the below link, however I was not convinced and my focus is more on Certified Scrum master.

Link: QA as Scrum Master

Answer 1

Anybody can be the Scrum Master, just make sure the Scrum Master has no other conflict of interest roles as Product Owner, Manager or Stakeholder.

Personally I think testers have the potential to be great Scrum Masters, because:

• Testers discover problems/defects, but often do not demand a certain solution. Its up-to-the owners of the issue to find the best solution. This places us already in a sort of servant leader situation, which could lead to team to accept findings from a tester more easily than from a manager or a co-developer.
• Focus on quality, also in processes. As testers often have a broader role. From requirements till deployment. Getting people out of their silos might be easier if you understand the full process end2end.
• Continuous improvement should already by a part of your job, how do you prevent defects from reoccurring. This could also be applied to other parts of the SDLC.
• Testers should be better at communication with different roles than for example developers. Since they have more interaction when escalating quality issues and or trying to reproduce issues. Testers should be able to communicate with Users, Managers, Developer and Stakeholders in their own language. Where most developers are just too technical and traditional project managers are not at all technical.

This is just somethings that come to mind. Getting the certification might be a good reason for a team to let you try the Scrum Master role for a while in an existing team.

If your company already uses Scrum doing the certification is a good idea anyway. Understanding and improving your Scrum knowledge is good for any member of a Scrum team, I would advise anyone on a Scrum team to do a training, read a good Scrum book and or do the certifications.

Answer 2

As Niels van Reijmersdal already pointed out anybody can be Scrum Master as long as there is no conflict of interest.

But personally I wouldn't do a certification for Scrum Master - if I want to be a tester and scrum master. Better invest the time and money in certified (agile) tester course IMHO.

Here you can also find a scrum guide - quite short though.

If you already are working in the scrum and have some experience with it, you could ask your current Scrum Master if it would be possible to let you try this role for one or two sprints.