empowered with current information, it eliminates the time-consuming need for developers to keep track of metrics or orient themselves to a project's current state. In fact, once they're up-to-speed, developers have nowhere to go but forward.
Of course, it should be mentioned that the ScrumMaster's efforts to ensure the team remains connected is not a substitute, but a complement to the team members' communication among themselves.
While bettering processes and, consequently, boosting productivity are primary objectives of Scrum, the ScrumMaster role nonetheless plays an especially important role in facilitating those improvements. And through the framework's intentional construction, the ScrumMaster facilitates communication and improved processes via every point of contact with the team and the Product Owner. The ScrumMaster actively works to understand and then remove the impediments that prevent a team from performing to its potential, while working closely with the Product Owner to remove barriers between the development and the Product Owner so that the Product Owner can focus on directly driving ‘what' is to be developed.
At the same time, the ScrumMaster attempts to keep all stakeholders informed through various information radiators-not the least of which is the ScrumMaster role itself. But because Scrum is a framework, a system in which all the constituent parts depend on one another for success, the Product Owner and the team play important roles in facilitating productivity. In the second installment of this series, I'll turn the discussion to the Product Owner role and how it also enables teams to push productivity to the next level.
About the Author
In August 2000, Laszlo Szalva y founded Danube Technologies, Inc. with his brother Victor in Seattle, Wash. to provide software and training exclusively focused on the Scrum method of agile software development. The company's ScrumWorks® Pro and ScrumWorks Basic products are licensed to more than 105,000 software professionals worldwide, making it the most widely used software in the industry for managing Scrum projects. ScrumWorks Pro recently received a Jolt Productivity Award at the 19 th annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards. Danube complements its software offering with a comprehensive schedule of ScrumCORE TM training courses, which are taught globally by Danube's four Certified Scrum Trainers.
[i] Source: Agile Project Management with Scrum , Ken Schwaber