What describes a Scrum master's role in Agile development?

The Scrum Master acts as a servant-leader for the Scrum Team. Their primary responsibility is to foster an effective and productive environment by guiding the team in adhering to Scrum theory, practices, and rules. A core function of this role is identifying and removing impediments—any obstacles that hinder the team's progress toward achieving the Sprint Goal. They facilitate Scrum events and coach the team on self-management and cross-functionality, ensuring the process runs smoothly and the team can focus on delivering value.

A. Coordinating team logistics and managing external vendors is more aligned with a traditional project manager or coordinator role, not the facilitation-focused Scrum Master.

B. Reviewing code and merging development branches are technical responsibilities typically handled by developers, a tech lead, or a DevOps team.

D. Monitoring system performance and reporting outages falls under the purview of an IT operations, SRE, or system administration team.

1. Schwaber

K.

& Sutherland

J. (2020). The Scrum Guide. Scrum.org. p. 7. The guide states

"The Scrum Master serves the Scrum Team in several ways

including: ... Causing the removal of impediments to the Scrum Team’s progress; and

Ensuring that all Scrum events take place and are positive

productive

and kept within the timebox."

2. MIT OpenCourseWare. (2016). 16.852J / ESD.342J Integrated Concurrent Engineering

Lecture 11: Agile Product Development. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Slide 18

"Scrum Roles

" describes the Scrum Master as the one who "Removes impediments" and "Enforces rules."

3. Stray

V.

& Moe

N. B. (2020). Understanding coordination in global software engineering: A mixed-methods study on the use of meetings and Slack. Journal of Systems and Software

170

110717. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2020.110717. In Section 2.1

the paper describes the Scrum Master's role as a facilitator who "is responsible for removing impediments that hinder the team’s progress."