What are the key responsibilities of a scrum master in an agile project?

In my experience, a Scrum Master makes sure the team timely identifies dependencies and the Scrum Master proactively coordinates dependencies to ensure the dependencies and deliveries are in sync. A Scrum Master shields the team from external distractions to enable them focus. A Scrum Master helps the Product Owner order and effectively manage the Product backlog items ensuring the stories are groomed, prioritized and sprint ready. The Scrum Master ensures that the team's work is transparent, visible, clearly understood on the team’s board and progress is radiated to the team and stakeholders.

A scrum master is responsible for ensuring that the scrum team follows the principles and practices of the scrum framework, which is a popular agile methodology. The scrum framework consists of three roles (scrum master, product owner, and development team), four events (sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review, and sprint retrospective), and three artifacts (product backlog, sprint backlog, and increment). The scrum master helps the team understand and apply the scrum values, rules, and processes, and removes any impediments that might hinder the team's progress.

I start with “what purpose of the scrum master?” To me, the purpose of scrum master is “to create the highest performing team known to mankind!” Then they use various techniques to achieve that purpose. Techniques based on principles, science, physics, experience, etc.

Many times when team is formed, people from different expertise are brought together. It is an art of Scrum master to make them into a cohesive team, create an environment where team members move from "I" shared skills to "T" shaped skills and focus on end to end value delivery than just their core expertise like development, design, testing etc. How can a Scrum Master enable this - 1) Create Working agreements between the team members 2) Constantly measure "Team" performance and not individual performance 3) Focus on Value delivery - Outcome than output

Der Scrum Master hat in erster Linie eine unterstützende Funktion, sein Ziel ist es das Team in seiner Dynamik und Entwicklung so zu beeinflussen, dass ein respektvoller, konstruktiver Umgang ermöglicht wird. Er hilft dem Team in der Schlichtung und Lösung von Konflikten innerhalb des Teams und sorgt dafür, dass das Scrum Team definierte Ziele hat, diese versteht und die Mittel zur Erreichung dieser hat.

This terminology is slightly out of date and/or inaccurate... The 2020 Scrum Guide talks about... Self management rather than just self organisation The Scrum Master as a true leader who serves rather than a servant leader Goals rather than vision And the Scrum Master is not responsible for facilitating collaboration between the team and the Product Owner... the Product Owner is actually part of the team(!)

Virtually every word of this is incorrect. - The Scrum Master is *not* responsible for engaging with stakeholders but helping them understand how to interact with the team - It is *not* the Scrum Master's job to keep stakeholders informed, produce status reports or protect the team!

Scrum master is servant leader responsible for conducting all the scrum methodology Agile ceremonies such as Daily standup meeting, Sprint planning meeting, Sprint demo meeting and Sprint Retrospectives and ensures there is no bottlenecks delivering the project. At the end of each sprint Scrum Master needs to check the team productivity metrics such as Throughput (user stories completed + bug fixes done in that sprint) and Velocity (Number of story points completed in that sprint) and by looking at burndown chart, scrum master and team gets visibility of how things are getting done. Scrum master generally creates a dashboard in Project management tool like in JIRA which is helpful for entire team/stakeholders to see project status /updates.

The Product owner is also known as the Voice of the customer. They are the custodian of the problem being solved and they with back with several iterations of the product to get the customer's perspective. The Scrum Master on the other hand through one of the Scrum Ceremonies would engaged sponsors and stakeholders ensuring everyone is aligned on teams objectives, there are no blockers or impediments hindering the team from performing at its best and shielding the team from unnecessary distractions

The scrum master should always push for CI but we need not to push for it if the team does not see for the need. Always remember that improvements or change should come from a need for change to make it more engaging and to have everyone involve themselves

Der Scrum Master trägt die Verantwortung dafür den Gedanken der kontinuierlichen Verbesserung in das Team zu tragen und das Team entsprechend dazu zu befähigen geeignete Wege aus sich heraus entwickeln zu können, dieser Idee Rechnung zu tragen. Er agiert dabei jedoch nicht dogmatisch sondern führt das Team auf der gemeinsamen Lernreise und steht ihm unterstützdend zur Seite.

Most important aspect of Scrum Master role is cultivate an environment of "Continuous Learning". This will not come naturally to most of us and hence Scrum master plays a crucial role to coach, guide the team members at right time and at right places, how they can continuously improve. How would Scrum Master do this 1) By immersing himself/herself in to delivery - Do the Gemba Walk - Be with team in all "senses" 2) Bring in the outside team perspective to optimize what team is doing and how team is planning to do 3) Gain an agreement and support from key stakeholders, leaders to support this environment and create a culture of continuous learning 4) Gamification of learning

Meiner Erfahrung nach arbeiten gute Scrum Master daran sich selbst im Team überflüssig zu machen, da das Team durch die gemeinsame Arbeit Verhaltensweisen, Ideen und Handlungen in einer Form adaptiert, die Notwendig eines einzelnen Verantwortlichen für die Teamentwicklung obsolet werden zu lassen. Dafür ist es notwendig dem Team nicht nur Scrum beizubringen, sondern auch die dahinter liegenden Prinzipen zu verdeutlichen, dies kann durch den Einblick und die Erprobung anderer agiler Frameworks oder Methoden in einem experimentellen Rahmen geschehen.

One mind shift that often needs to take place in new agile teams (and reinforced in experienced teams) is that metrics like capacity and cadence deliver what many teams lack in a plan-based ("waterfall") approach: empiricism. Transparency into the size of the effort (and their ability to deliver on it) allows the team to proactively say when they expect to deliver something. Rather than reacting to someone's subjective plan.

I spend a lot of time observing and serving teams, stakeholders, leaders, etc. I believe it's about people first so take a human interaction approach over any process or tool. Scrum Alliance has a blog I relate to titled "Developers hack code. ScrumMasters hack people." Sometimes I use agile ways of working and sometimes I don't. It's like parenting 😊 Always, always focusing on what people need and are saying. Find a way to be what the team needs to do their job better.