The agile team concept is one of the Scrum practices that might be difficult to fully grasp. For me at least, this is a continuous learning experience.
We have been following agile for few iterations now. We slowly adapted all the processes and learned and improved from problems we faced. We learned that to succeed in this, all team members (scrum) have to understand all concepts and processes.
Scrum is a lightweight framework designed to help small, close-knit teams of people develop complex products. Scrum recognizes only three distinct roles:-
Product Owner
Scrum Master
Team Members
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Scrum Master
Those who are new to agile assume that the scrum master and the Project Manager are the same roles. This is absolutely not the case. The two roles are very different.
A scrum master is the facilitator for a product development team that uses scrum
The scrum master does not manages the team that produce the work, instead he supports the product owner, Coaches the team and make sure that the scrum processes are adhered to. He is responsible for Scrum Process, its Implementation, and maximization of the processes benefits.
The Scrum Master is there to help, to provide a consultancy role and to look at the project from all angles. Product Owners look to the Scrum Master to help them answer questions about user experience, about issues with functionality, about a need to realign the development to fit with changes outside the business. The Scrum Master helps the Product Owner understand how to effectively manage the work of the team using the product backlog and the planning and review meetings.
Working as a Scrum Master @ Naukri
Before starting to work as a Scrum master, we went through all the roles that a scrum master should be responsible for provided by ScrumMaster Manifesto.
We identified few roles and step by step started to take charge for those roles.
We started off with some basic roles and responsibilities a scrum master should follow.
BASIC ROLE
The basic role for a scrum master to follow before an iteration get started includes helping the Team Members –
- Coaching team members about processes and their implementation.
- Consulting team members regarding everything Agile.
- Encouraging the use of Agile Engineering Practices within the Team.
- Bringing people together who should talk to each other on any particular issue.
- Giving feedbacks to the team and suggesting the ways to improve more upon our practises and outputs.
After getting hold on the basic roles and responsibilities, we started helping product team for getting the product requirements and stories sorted.
ASSISTING PRODUCT
Scrum master also helps the product owners which includes: –
- Product Backlog ordering
- Story Grooming
- Helping with Release Planning
We helped to get all the required people for the above processes and facilitate the meet.
Finally, we took full charge and started facilitating our scrum team on everything required to help the team to maximize the team output.
PRE-ITERATION/ITERATION PLANNING
Facilitating Team and product owners in pre-iterations and Iteration meeting.
Working with team about what went wrong and why, in previous Iteration and suggesting steps to improve upon them in Retrospection.
Scrum master helps the team during Iteration to maintain their Scrum tools like Story Board, daily stand-ups, reminding team about their arrangements and commitments and helping team for resolving all issues hampering the team pace and development time, like test server, staging server, deployer issues and also mediating the general conflicts between development Team and product owners.
Agile Board to help scrum team and scrum master to manage the sprint
Last but not the least, scrum master is responsible to analyse the difficulties scrum faced during a particular iteration and think for something to improve the processes and practices and self-updating which includes:-
- Continuing learning regarding everything Agile (e.g. visit user groups, read books, write blogs, etc.).
- Keeping in touch with every stakeholder regularly.
- Being familiar with the team’s work (i.e. the product)
- Checking all the models/processes the team uses and problems team is facing and work arounds for those.
The All-New Naukri iOS App (6.0)