What is Agile? – What is Scrum? – Agile FAQ’s | Cprime

The three roles defined in Scrum are the ScrumMaster, the Product Owner, and the Team (which consists of Team members). The people who fulfill these roles work together closely, on a daily basis, to ensure the smooth flow of information and the quick resolution of issues.

ScrumMaster

The ScrumMaster (sometimes written “Scrum Master,” although the official term has no space after “Scrum”) is the keeper of the process. The ScrumMaster is responsible for making the process run smoothly, for removing obstacles that impact productivity, and for organizing and facilitating the critical meetings. The ScrumMasters responsibilities include

• Teach the Product Owner how to maximize return on investment (ROI), and meet his/her objectives through Scrum.
• Improve the lives of the development Team by facilitating creativity and empowerment.
• Improve the productivity of the development Team in any way possible.
• Improve the engineering practices and tools so that each increment of functionality is potentially shippable.
• Keep information about the Team’s progress up to date and visible to all parties.

In practical terms, the ScrumMaster needs to understand Scrum well enough to train and mentor the other roles, and educate and assist other stakeholders who are involved in the process. The ScrumMaster should maintain a constant awareness of the status of the project (its progress to date) relative to the expected progress, investigate and facilitate resolution of any roadblocks that hold back progress, and generally be flexible enough to identify and deal with any issues that arise, in any way that is required. The ScrumMaster must protect the Team from disturbance from other people by acting as the interface between the two. The ScrumMaster does not assign tasks to Team members, as task assignment is a Team responsibility. The ScrumMaster’s general approach towards the Team is to encourage and facilitate their decision-making and problem-solving capabilities, so that they can work with increasing efficiency and decreasing need for supervision. The goal is to have a team that is not only empowered to make important decisions, but does so well and routinely.

Product Owner

The Product Owner is the keeper of the requirements. The Product Owner provides the “single source of truth” for the Team regarding requirements and their planned order of implementation. In practice, the Product Owner is the interface between the business, the customers, and their product related needs on one side, and the Team on the other. The Product Owner buffers the Team from feature and bug-fix requests that come from many sources, and is the single point of contact for all questions about product requirements. Product Owner works closely with the team to define the user-facing and technical requirements, to document the requirements as needed, and to determine the order of their implementation. Product Owner maintains the Product Backlog (which is the repository for all of this information), keeping it up to date and at the level of detail and quality the Team requires. The Product Owner also sets the schedule for releasing completed work to customers, and makes the final call as to whether implementations have the features and quality required for release.

Team

The Team is a self-organizing and cross-functional group of people who do the hands-on work of developing and testing the product. Since the Team is responsible for producing the product, it must also have the authority to make decisions about how to perform the work. The Team is therefore self-organizing: Team members decide how to break work into tasks, and how to allocate tasks to individuals, throughout the Sprint. The Team size should be kept in the range from five to nine people, if possible. (A larger number make communication difficult, while a smaller number leads to low productivity and fragility.) Note: A very similar term, “Scrum Team,” refers to the Team plus the ScrumMaster and Product Owner.