ScrumMaster & Scrum Team

The ScrumMaster is responsible for making sure a Scrum team lives by the values and practices of Scrum. The ScrumMaster protects the team by making sure they do not overcommit themselves to what they can achieve during a sprint.

The ScrumMaster facilitates the daily scrum and becomes responsible for removing any obstacles that are brought up by the team during those meetings.

The ScrumMaster role is typically filled by a project manager or a technical team leader but can be anyone.


Scrum teams do not include any of the traditional software engineering roles such as programmer, designer, tester, or architect. Everyone on the project works together to complete the set of work they have collectively committed to complete within a sprint. Scrum teams develop a deep form of camaraderie and a feeling that "we're all in this together."

A typical Scrum team is 6-10 people but Jeff Sutherland has scaled Scrum up to over 500 people and I have used it with over 150.

The primary way of scaling Scrum to work with large teams is to coordinate a "Scrum of Scrums." With this approach each Scrum team proceeds as normal but each team also contributes one person who attends Scrum of Scrum meetings to coordinate the work of multiple Scrum teams. These meetings are analogous to the Daily Scrum Meeting, but do not necessarily happen every day. In many organizations, having a Scrum of Scrums meeting two or three times a week is sufficient.