Backing up the unreliable people

March 25, 2006 by Artem

Scrum Master role in the Scrum development method in the first place "was designed to change the power relationship and interaction dynamics from the traditional Team Lead or Project Manager". Scrum Master organizes the daily meetings, removes the impediments, reminds the Sprint goal, often maintains the Sprint backlog and does other secretary-like work.

Scrum is all about the self-organizing teams. Then why can't the team itself do all these tasks? The answer is in that the only thing people are reliable in being unreliable. Without any evil intentions people tend to forget the agreed ways of working. From my point of view the main function of the Scrum Master is exactly to remind the agreed terms. As in any other agile method, team members have a lot of freedom in changing the rules of the game to suite them, but they are given the power of change only at the beginning of the iteration and have to express it explicitly. Scrum Master is for keeping the contracts during the iteration.

As far as I know in the eXtreme Programming there is a coach role that is dedicated exactly to keeping the XP rules. Could the XP-practitioners comment on the coach role? Is it analogous to Scrum Master or is it strictly about forcing the rules?

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