The simplest description is the Product Owner decides on the what, the Development team work out the how and the Scrum Master help the team achieve the how.
Scrum Master: protecting the scrum process and preventing distractions
- Responsible for helping the team deliver work to the Product Owner OR Client
- Makes sure the team can meet its commitments by removing any impediments they face, including Managing dependencies, escalating blockers that they cannot remove themselves
- Facilitates process & meetings (eg Reviews, Stand Ups, Planning, Estimation, Scheduling, Prioritisation)
- Makes sure the team is fully functional, productive and improving quality
- Shields the team from distractions and interferences (including the Product Owner)
- Enables close cooperation across all roles and functions, removes barriers
- Responsible for reporting progress, including producing standard outward-facing artefacts
- Manages Product Owners expectations of the team
- Responsible for keeping time and quality requirements
Product Owner: Determines what needs to be done and sets the priorities
- Voice of the Stakeholders, represents the business
- Manages stakeholder relationships, comms & expectations
- Accountable for the vision, scope, and scale of the product
- Defines key features of the product & success criteria
- Continuously refines requirements
- Sets delivery schedule by managing the backlog – creates and updates the release plan, including prioritisation
- Accountable for the project success
- Decides on release date, content and budget
- Accepts and rejects work in the sprint reviews
- Takes advice from the team on Backlog Dependencies
- Single point of contact for the product (including New requirements Prioritising backlog items) –
Development Team: Takes on and determines how to deliver chunks of the product in regular increments
- They have to break down the requirements, create tasks, estimate and distribute them. In other words, this means that they have to create the Sprint Backlog.
- They have to perform the short Daily Sprint Meeting.
- They have to ensure that at the end of the Sprint potentially shippable functionality is delivered.
- They have to update the status and the remaining efforts for their tasks to allow creation, of a Sprint Burndown Diagram.
