Identifying roles and responsibilities

There are only three roles in Scrum: Product Owner, Scrum Master, and developers. Adding additional roles and responsibilities does not add value in the Scrum framework and can cause more overhead, inefficiencies, and bottlenecks in the development process. Let's take a closer look at these roles.

Note that Scrum does not have the role of the project manager. However, Ken Schwaber, in his book titled Agile Project Management with Scrum, notes that the Scrum Master is, in effect, the project manager for Scrum-based projects. Nevertheless, the responsibilities of the Scrum Master are quite different. I'll address those differences shortly in the Scrum Masters subsection. But first, we will start with the first role in Scrum, which is the Product Owner.

Product Owners

It may seem counterintuitive, but the Product Owner role is a part-time position with regards to supporting the Scrum development effort. The Product Owner is effectively...