Scrum Master Role Research Articles

Spearheading agile: the role of the scrum master in agile projects

Scrum innovated the role of the scrum master in software engineering. The scrum master is envisioned in agile literature as the “servant leader” who serves the team in a multitude of different ways, which include promoting scrum, facilitating the team’s functioning, and removing obstacles. However, empirical studies focusing on the role of the scrum master in practice are scarce. To address this gap, a Grounded Theory study with a mixed methods approach was carried out which included semi-structured interviews with 39 software practitioners and a questionnaire with 47 respondents. In this study, we present and describe the scrum master’s role in agile projects in terms of (a) the grounded theory of the role of the scrum master which involves everyday activities of facilitating, mentoring, negotiating, process adapting, coordinating, and protecting; (b) the varying involvement of the scrum master in selected agile practices carried out by the team; and (c) a positive association between the presence of the scrum master and the frequency with which agile practices are carried out by the team. This study presents for the first time a multifaceted study of the multiple dimensions of the scrum master role and will enable practitioners to better manage expectations of this role in practice.

Supporting HFOSS using scrum in a capstone course

Supporting HFOSS using scrum in a capstone course

Product Owner Agile Systems Engineering Strategies

AbstractIn the Scrum Agile approach there is an important role defined for the Product Owner who is the proxy for the Customer and who is supposed to be engaged in laying out the work to be performed by the team by prioritizing the product Backlog. It turns out that this is a neglected role in the literature with only a few books dedicated just to this role, the most interesting of which is by Pichler1, while there are many books dedicated to the Scrum Master role. Of course the role is mentioned in many other of the basic books on Scrum, but we would expect more explicit refinement of the role based on the fact it is essential in driving the process. Also in larger organizations this role becomes conflated with that of the Product Manager, and Leffingwell suggests that the Product Owner is a transformation of that role and that Product Owners probably work for the Product Manager on large projects. What is called Product Manager in commercial firms is the Systems Engineer role in aerospace. The Systems Engineer is the person responsible for the whole product working as advertised when delivered to the customer. The techniques that the Product Owner should draw from are those developed in Systems Engineering as a discipline. However, we need to make those techniques of Systems Engineering more agile in keeping with its spirit of increased efficiency and effectiveness in product development. Here we will apply what we learned about the essential structure of the product and its lifecycle in terms of traceability in the paper “The Essential Nature of Product Traceability and its relation to Agile Approaches” in order to explore the nature of this role, along with the idea of Pichler not mentioned in his book but developed later about multidimensional backlogs.