Abstract
Scrum innovated the role of the scrum master in software engineering. The scrum master is envisioned in agile literature as the “servant leader” who serves the team in a multitude of different ways, which include promoting scrum, facilitating the team’s functioning, and removing obstacles. However, empirical studies focusing on the role of the scrum master in practice are scarce. To address this gap, a Grounded Theory study with a mixed methods approach was carried out which included semi-structured interviews with 39 software practitioners and a questionnaire with 47 respondents. In this study, we present and describe the scrum master’s role in agile projects in terms of (a) the grounded theory of the role of the scrum master which involves everyday activities of facilitating, mentoring, negotiating, process adapting, coordinating, and protecting; (b) the varying involvement of the scrum master in selected agile practices carried out by the team; and (c) a positive association between the presence of the scrum master and the frequency with which agile practices are carried out by the team. This study presents for the first time a multifaceted study of the multiple dimensions of the scrum master role and will enable practitioners to better manage expectations of this role in practice.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Anderson DJ, Carmichael A (2016) Essential Kanban Condensed. Blue Hole Press
Bass JM (2013) Agile Method Tailoring in Distributed Enterprises: Product Owner Teams. In: IEEE 8th Int. Conf. Global Software Eng, pp 154–163. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICGSE.2013.27
Beck K, Andres C (2005) Extreme programming explained: embrace change. Addison-Wesley, Boston
Birks M, Chapman Y, Francis K (2008) Memoing in qualitative research: probing data and processes. J Res Nurs 13:68–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/1744987107081254
Brewer J, Hunter A (1989) Multimethod research: A synthesis of styles, Sage library of social research (Vol. 175). Sage Publications
Cockburn A, Highsmith J (2001) Agile software development, the people factor. IEEE Computer 34:131–133. https://doi.org/10.1109/2.963450
Chow T, Cao DB (2008) A survey study of critical success factors in agile software projects. J Syst Software 81:961–971. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2007.08.020
Chagas L, de Carvalho D, Lima A, Reis C (2014) Systematic literature review on the characteristics of agile project management in the context of maturity models. In: Mitasiunas A., Rout T., O’Connor R.V., Dorling A. (eds) Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination. SPICE 2014. Communications in Computer and Information Science (Vol. 477). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13036-1_16
Charmaz K (2006) Constructing grounded theory- a practical guide through qualitative analysis. Sage Publications Ltd, Thousand Oaks
Creswell JW (2012) Qualitative inquiry and research design: choosing among five approaches. Sage Publications Ltd, Los Angeles
Creswell JW, Plano Clark VL (2011) Designing and conducting mixed methods research. Sage Publications Ltd, Los Angeles
Deemer GBP, Larman C,Vodde B (2012). The Scrum Primer. http://scrumprimer.org/. Accessed 20 November 2018
Denzin NK, Lincoln YS (2017) The SAGE handbook of qualitative research, 5th edn. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks
Dybå T, Dingsøyr T (2008) Empirical studies of agile software development: a systematic review. Inform Software Technol 50:833–859. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2008.01.006
Easterbrook S, Singer J, Storey MA, Damian D (2008) Selecting empirical methods for software engineering research. In: In guide to advanced empirical software engineering. Springer, London, pp 285–311
Fowler M, Highsmith J (2001) The agile manifesto. Software Develop Magazine 9:29–30
Glaser BG (1992) Basics of grounded theory analysis. Sociology Press, Mill Valley
Glaser BG, Holton J (2004) Remodeling grounded theory. Forum Qual Soc Res 5:47–68. https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-5.2.607
Glaser BG, Strauss AL (1967) The discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. Aldine, New Brunswick
Glaser BG (1978) Theoretical sensitivity: advances in the methodology of grounded theory. Sociology Press, Mill Valley
Hoda R, Noble J (2017) Becoming agile: a grounded theory of agile transitions in practice. In: Proc. of the 39th Int. Conf. Software Eng (ICSE ’17), pp 141–151. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2017.21
Hoda R, Noble J, Marshall S (2013) Self-organizing roles on agile software development teams. IEEE Trans Software Eng 39:422–444. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2012.30
Hoda R, Noble J, Marshall S (2012) Developing a grounded theory to explain the practices of self-organizing agile teams. Empirical Software Eng 17:609–639. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-011-9161-0
Hoda R, Noble J, Marshall S (2011) The impact of inadequate customer collaboration on self-organizing agile teams. Inform Software Technol 53:521–534. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2010.10.009
Howe KR (1988) Against the quantitative-qualitative incompatibility thesis or dogmas die hard. Educ Res 17:10–16. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X017008010
James W (1975) Pragmatism. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
Johnson RB, Onwuegbuzie AJ (2004) Mixed methods research: a research paradigm whose time has come. Educ Res 33:14–26. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X033007014
Martin A, Biddle R, Noble J (2010) An ideal customer: a grounded theory of requirements elicitation, communication and acceptance on agile projects. Agile software development: current research and future directions 111-141. In: Dingsøyr T, Dybå T, Moe NB (eds) . Springer, Berlin Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12575-1_6
Noll J, Razzak MA, Bass JM, Beecham S (2017) A study of the scrum Master’s role. In: Felderer M., Méndez Fernández D., Turhan B., Kalinowski M., Sarro F., Winkler D. (eds) Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Vol. 10611). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69926-4_22
Palmer SR, Felsing M (2001) A practical guide to feature-driven development. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River
Schwaber K, Beedle M (2002) Agile software development with scrum. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River
Shastri Y, Hoda R, Amor R (2020) Survey of roles in agile project management and their involvement in agile practices, Harvard Dataverse, V1. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QEASRH, Harvard Dataverse, V1
Shastri Y, Hoda R, Amor R (2017) Understanding the roles of the manager in agile Project Management. In: Proceedings of the 10th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (ISEC '17), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, pp 45–55. https://doi.org/10.1145/3021460.3021465
Siddique L, Hussein BA (2016) Grounded theory study of conflicts in Norwegian agile software projects: the project managers' perspective. J Eng Proj Prod Manage 6:120–135
Sutherland J, Schwaber K (2017) The scrum guide: the definitive guide to scrum. https://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum-Guide-US.pdf#zoom=100. Accessed 22 November 2018
Stapleton J (2003) DSDM: business focused development. Addison-Wesley, Boston
Stol KJ, Ralph P, Fitzgerald B (2016) Grounded theory in software engineering research: a critical review and guidelines. In: ICSE ’16: proceedings of the 38th ACM/IEEE international conference on software engineering, ACM, pp 120–131. https://doi.org/10.1145/2884781.2884833
Stray V, Sjøberg DIK, Dybå T (2016) The daily stand-up meeting: a grounded theory study. J. Syst Software 114:101–124. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2016.01.004
Tashakkori A, Teddlie C (1998) Mixed methodology: combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. Applied Social Research Methods. Sage Publications Inc.
Tavakol M, Dennick R (2011) Making sense of Cronbach's alpha. Int J Med Educ 2:53–55. https://doi.org/10.5116/ijme.4dfb.8dfd
VersionOne Inc. (2018). The 12th annual state of agile report. VersionOne Incorporated. https://explore.versionone.com/state-of-agile/versionone-12th-annual-state-of-agile-report. Accessed 20 November 2018
VersionOne Inc. (2017). The 11th annual state of agile report. VersionOne Incorporated. https://explore.versionone.com/state-of-agile/versionone-11th-annual-state-of-agile-report. Accessed 19 June 2018
Waterman M, Noble J, Allan G (2015) How much up-front?: a grounded theory of agile architecture. In: ICSE ’15: proceedings of the 37th ACM/IEEE international conference on software engineering, ACM, pp 347–357. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2015.54
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the participants of this research and the University of Auckland Ethics Committee.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Communicated by: Hakan Erdogmus
Appendix
Appendix
1.1 Part A- Interview Questions
During the interview, research participants were requested to use the same project which was used to fill the online pre-interview questionnaire. This list is purely indicative and questions were modified or dropped depending on the flow of the conversation in the interviews.
-
1.
Please tell me briefly about your professional background and how you were introduced to agile and scrum?
-
2.
Could you give a brief background of the project/product and describe your role on the project/product?
-
3.
Was the team self-organizing? What steps were taken to encourage the team to be self-organizing?
-
4.
Was there any conflict in the team and how was it resolved? Please give an example.
-
5.
Were there any obstacles in the way of team functioning/performance? If yes, how were they resolved?
-
6.
Who was responsible for negotiating with stakeholders/vendors/customer representatives? How was the negotiation process done?
-
7.
Were there any distractions to the teams functioning? How were distractions dealt with? Please give an example.
-
8.
Were some of scrum practices adapted or changed to fit your project context? E.g. Using Kanban methods in conjunction with scrum.
-
9.
Were the stakeholders and team well versed in scrum practices?
-
10.
Could you give example of a time when you provided guidance to the team and ensured adherence to agile/scrum practices?
-
11.
Were there any occasions when you had to either make the team understand the strategic business context or make stakeholders understand technical vocabulary?
-
12.
Is there anything you would like to add?
1.2 Part B- Supplementary Tables
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Shastri, Y., Hoda, R. & Amor, R. Spearheading agile: the role of the scrum master in agile projects . Empir Software Eng 26, 3 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-020-09899-4
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-020-09899-4