The development team is responsible for timely delivery of the product. An average team is typically made up of 7 people that have cross-functional skill sets. The team is self-organizing because they decide who and how the work is to be accomplished. The team takes on different responsibilities depending on the nature of their work and skill sets that they have. They are responsible for the achieving commitments that they make at the sprint planning and sprint review meetings.

The scrum master helps facilitates the scrum process and to make sure that things are running smoothly. The master resolves impediments at the team and organization level. The master is not the leader of the team (the team is self-organizing) but acts as a buffer between the team and the outside interference or environment such as the customers, government regulations and requirements. The scrum master also ensures that the scrum process is adhered to. The master helps with the product owner with planning and team motivation.

The roles and responsibilities of the product owner, the development team, and the scrum master are organized and coordinated at the scrum meetings. These meetings are held in series.

The first meeting is the planning meeting. The product owner and development team negotiate which product backlog the team will attempt this sprint. The product owner identifies the features that are most important and the team determines what is possible this sprint. If a certain key items cannot be completed with four weeks, the team will negotiate with the product owner on breaking the features down to a doable piece. All committed features to be built are recorded in a product backlog. The development team uses this backlog to prioritize specific work to be done and assign initial responsibilities. These works is recorded in a sprint backlog.

According to Larson and Clifford (page 590), the heartbeat of an agile project is the daily scrum meeting known as scrum. Each day, team members stand in a circle and take turns to answer the following question

• What have you accomplished since the last scrum?
• What will you do between now and the next scrum?
• What are the stumbling blocks that are in your way from performing your work as effectively as possible?

The meeting is intended to last for 15 minutes and is held by white board where all tasks and blocks (things in the way) are recorded. The scrum master erases the blocks once they have been removed. Members stand to show sense of urgency.

Scrum creates daily mechanism to quickly inform the team about the state of the project. It encourages openness and resolution of problems in real time. All the team members have a say at the meeting so that no one is left behind. Having everyone report what they plan to do for that day generates a social promise in the group, thus increasing accountability among the members. Keep in mind that the team is self-managed. The project manager, also called the scrum master does not assign daily tasks to the team members. The scrum master’s role is to make sure that the scrum is running correctly. In other words, the scrum master is the master of the process (Larson and Clifford, 591).


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