Scrum Master Responsibilities

Overview

Scrum masters play a key role in ensuring smooth running of a scrum team and timely delivery of commitments. In my organization I have mentored, coached and appointed scrum masters for each engineering team. However, for the scrum masters to be successful and thus enable success of their respective teams it is important to set expectations and clearly outline responsibilities. This post outlines these responsibilities and expectations.

Sprint Planning

Pre-planning

Scrum masters should work with their engineering manager and relevant product manager to determine the sprint drivers ahead of time. This should ideally be a result of the regular backlog review and/or pre-sprint planning meeting. The prioritized backlog or the next sprint itself should already have some work items/tickets allocated.

Planning meeting

During sprint planning, scrum master should allocate tickets to the sprint based on inputs from engineering manager and product manager. They should then assign these tickets to team members based on inputs from the engineering manager. Tickets allocated for the sprint should be based team capacity.

During the sprint

Scrum master should run the daily standup. Specifically s/he should focus on, if each team member:

• is making progress with their allocated work and what they intend to work on until the next standup.
• is blocked or not, and if blocked how to unblock them and allow them to make progress.
• is not sitting idle waiting for work.

Scrum master should also holistically look at the sprint board and

• ensure that team is on track towards 100% sprint completion.
• check if any load balancing needs to be done.

It is likely that some mid-sprint (MSA) addition may come about. In which case scrum master can

• either remove an equivalent ticket from the sprint board then itself, or
• look at [all MSAs] towards the end of the sprint and remove equivalent tickets at one go.

The equivalency can be determined based on individual ticket’s original estimates or story points.

Scrum master should also do a checkpoint of the sprint board in the middle of the sprint and check for any sprint completion risks.

Scrum master should also do a checkpoint of

• the sprint board and check for any sprint completion risks.
• the release specific [filter] for unresolved tickets.
• un-triaged tickets using the appropriate [filter].

Scrum master should ensure that all committed tickets have a parent epic, and assigned to the right team. This can monitor this using [Jira Plans]^[1].

Towards the end of the sprint

Scrum master should ensure that sprint completion is 100%. Guidance for moving items to next sprint:

• If a MSA came about 1-2 days before end of sprint, and that specific item is not getting done by end of sprint, it can be moved to next sprint.
• If a ticket is pending on other ticket(s) it can be moved to next sprint.

For every ticket moved to the next sprint, there needs to be an accompanying comment.

A ticket should not be arbitrarily moved to next sprint without just cause.

During sprint retrospective, scrum master should drive discussion around sprint completion.