AGILE IN ACTION

Ken Schwaber describes the scrum master as a sheepdog who would do anything to protect the flock, and who never gets distracted from that duty.

The scrum master is the driving force behind scrum. The scrum team relies on the scrum master to ensure they live by scrum’s values, enact scrum’s practices, and abide by scrum’s rules. The scrum master is responsible for bringing all the components of scrum together to function as a process. The scrum team’s welfare is the scrum master’s highest responsibility. He must demonstrate commitment to the scrum team so they can see that he’s devoted to the team and will always protect and help them. However, if the scrum team breaks one of the scrum rules, the scrum master must insist that the team takes steps to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. If someone isn’t completing work, the scrum master takes the initiative and informs the rest of the scrum team so they can decide how best to help.

The scrum team looks to the scrum master to set them up for success. This is achieved by aligning roles and responsibilities, and organizing and facilitating sprint planning meetings, sprint reviews and retrospectives. The scrum master helps the scrum team maintain productivity by removing obstacles, making prompt decisions when required, and by facilitating daily scrum meetings which provide a forum for the scrum team to synchronize, inspect and adapt. Engineering practices and tools are improved so that each increment of functionality is potentially shippable and progress is gauged by the scrum master and made visible to all parties with a public burndown chart.

The scrum master helps the product owner and the scrum team work together so that the product owner can drive the development effort directly. He also coaches the product owner on how to maximize the return on investment by selecting the most valuable product backlog to be developed in a sprint.