The Roles of an Agile Scrum Project

Scrum Master

Even if you are new to Scrum, you may have heard of a role called the Scrum Master. The Scrum Master is the team’s facilitator, and helps the scrum team achieve their highest level of performance.

In the Scrum process, a Scrum Master differs from a traditional project manager in many ways, including that this role does not provide day-to-day direction to the team and does not assign tasks to individuals.

A good Scrum Master shelters the team from outside distractions, allowing the team to focus during the sprint on the goal they have selected.

Product Owner

While the Scrum Master focuses on helping the team, the product owner works to direct the team to the right goal. The product owner does this by creating a vision of the product, and then conveying that vision to the team through a product backlog.

The product owner is responsible for prioritizing the backlog during Scrum development, to ensure the team understands the system being built, its users, and so on.

Scrum Team

The third and final role is the Scrum team. Although individuals may join the team with various job titles, in Scrum, those titles are insignificant. The Scrum methodology states that each person contributes in whatever way they can to complete the work of each sprint.

This does not mean that a tester will be expected to develop the system; individuals will spend most of their time working in whatever discipline they worked before adopting the agile Scrum model. But with Scrum, individuals are expected to work beyond their preferred disciplines whenever doing so would be for the good of the team.