The Roles and Tasks of a Scrum Master

May this list be used to guide and answer questions of what is the role of a scum master and what do they do but not seen as a definitive checklist.

Special thanks to Ron Quartel, Angela Harms, and Srinivasa Badrinarayanan for helping perfect this list.

Facilitator

  • Facilitate Daily Scrum
  • Facilitate Retrospectives
  • Facilitate Sprint Planning What
  • Facilitate Sprint Planning How 
  • Mediate conflicts 
  • Backlog creation and grooming

Coach

  • Alert for learning opportunities
  • Provide feedback to team members
  • Reinforce agile principles
  • Reinforce  agile values
  • Encourage collaboration
  • Foster team self-organization
  • Challenge team with adopting agile best practices
  • Challenge team with adopting technical practices
  • Be courageous to deliver bad news early 
  • Relay single coaching message to team 
  • Relay organizational message to team
  • Mentor team members one-on-one
  • Help team inspect and adapt definition of done
  • Help team inspect and adapt working agreements
  • Help team learn to self facilitate
  • Respond to managements needs

Servant Leader

  • Protect scrum team from distractions
  • Help remove impediments as needed but help team self-organize
  • Be contact person for all things
  • Radiate project status visually to management, stakeholders, and team
  • Ready to work as a team member to support the process
  • Help maintain tools (backlog, metrics, radiators etc.)

Team Member

  • Execute PO and DEV tasks when able
  • Help create product roadmap
  • Help groom backlog 
  • Help write user stories
  • Help slicing user stories
  • Help write acceptance criteria
  • Help prioritize backlog
  • Help task stories
  • Help write sprint goals
  • Help wherever possible
  • Collocate with team

Teacher

  • Introduce best practices at relevant time
  • Exchange experiences with other process and technical coaches within the organization
  • Encourage agile technical practices within development team
  • Help further agile community within the organization
  • Provide learning opportunities to organization (talks, workshops, etc.)
  • Retire irrelevant practices as necessary

Student

  • Learn everything agile continuously through conferences, user groups, blogs, books, etc.
  • Visit other agile adoptions
  • Be coachable by other coaches

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