I like the open-mindedness; e.g.,

“How can they best deal with complexity? Sometimes Scrum is helpful. Sometimes it isn’t.”

and,

“I strongly recommend Scrum Masters to gain knowledge from other domains, frameworks, and methods as well. For example XP, Kanban and DevOps. But also areas like coaching, facilitation, and change management.”

The advice, “Actively participate in the Scrum community” should really be, IMO, “Actively participate in the Agile community”.

BTW, Scrum is largely incompatible with Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), which is a natural semi-parallel workflow that does not easily fit the start-stop nature of Scrum sprints. (Kanban is not a good fit either.)

Also, Agile cannot work at scale without DevOps. When you have many teams, and complex multi-component deep stack products in a multi-product digital platform, the issues that dominate are the inter-team issues — which Scrum has only inadequate answers for.

And if you want to get your cycle time down, technical issues are what dominate there — so if you don’t know DevOps methods, you won’t be able to participate in those conversations — let alone initiate them or drive them or even know that things are out of whack. In fact, I have noticed that when a SM “isn’t technical”, team members avoid mentioning technical issues during retros — and that is not good.

So I strongly recommend all SMs to learn about DevOps — at least take an interest in it. You don’t need to become a programmer. But not baby single-pipeline DevOps: real DevOps.