A scrum team has both a Scrum Master and a Product Owner besides the developers. The Scrum Master is about preserving the process, keeping the developers from being overworked, and eliminating problems in the organization or facilities that prevent productive work. The Product Owner's role is to communicate what the customers want to the developers, to determine when something does or doesn't meet the standards for delivery to the customers, and to clarify things like specs, feature lists, and possible completion dates between the team and the customers.

The Scrum Master is the team's good cop in case the Product Owner asks for too much from the team for too long. They improve the process, improve the working environment, and provide another person to push back against unreasonable demands. The Product Owner is the not bad but potentially overzealous one who wants the team to deliver a lot of business value to the customer every sprint.

The developers -- which often includes the programmers, QA, and documentation folks -- size the user stories and decide how many they are willing to accept in a sprint. They lean on the PO to get better specs. They lean on the SM to get meetings scheduled, get resources, and for advice about the Scrum process itself. It's very much about splitting the "we need to deliver a lot" and the "we need to observe sane work/life balance and prevent burnout in our employees" roles of a single Project Manager or Sub-project Manager so there's not too much sway one direction or the other.

A large overall project might have a Project Manager to whom the POs and the teams answer. Alternatively it may work as a scrum of scrums in which there's a head Product Owner and the other Product Owners deliver to that person while the Scrum Masters push impediments up to a head Scrum Master to get bigger or broader-reaching impediments fixed.

It's easy to dismiss something as snake oil without actually understanding it. At my employer everyone who works as a scrum team member gets certified as a Scrum Master to understand the process better. Then they do their own jobs while a Scrum Master who isn't necessarily as skilled in the technical parts of the job fills the role of keeping the process on track and serving the team's impediment removal needs. It isn't perfect but it can, for the right organization where it is a good fit, work very well. It's kind of like what Churchill said about democracy... Scrum is the worst form of project management framework except all the others that have been tried.

In reply to Re: Selling swimsuits to a drowning man by mr_mischief
in thread Selling swimsuits to a drowning man by locked_user sundialsvc4

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