John Noll

Scrum is an increasingly common approach to software development adopted by organizations around the world. However, as organizations transition from traditional plan-driven development to agile development with Scrum, the question arises as to which Scrum role (Product Owner, Scrum Master, or Scrum Team Member) corresponds to a Project Manager, or conversely which Scrum role should the Project Managers adopt? In an attempt to answer this question, we adopted a mixed-method research approach comprising a systematic literature review and embedded case study of a commercial software development team. Our research has identified activities that comprise the Scrum Master role, and which additional roles are actually performed by Scrum Masters in practice. We found nine activities that are performed by Scrum Masters. In addition, we found that Scrum Masters also perform other roles, most importantly as Project Managers. This latter situation results in tension and conflict of interest that could have a negative impact on the performance of the team as a whole. These results point to the need to re-assess the role of Project Managers in organizations that adopt Scrum as a development approach. We hypothesize that it might be better for Project Managers to become Product Owners, as aspects of this latter role are more consistent with the traditional responsibilities of a Project Manager.

Context: How to adopt, scale and tailor agile methods depends on several factors such as the size of the organization, business goals, operative model, and needs. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) was developed to support organizations to scale agile practices across the enterprise. Problem: Early adopters of SAFe tend to be large multi-national enterprises who report that the adoption of SAFe has led to significant productivity and quality gains. However, little is known about whether these benefits translate to small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Method: As part of a longitudinal study of an SME transitioning to SAFe we ask, to what extent are SAFe practices adopted at the team level? We targeted all team members and administrated a mixed method survey in February, 2017 and in July, 2017 to identify and evaluate the adoption rate of SAFe practices. Results: Initially in Quarter 1, teams were struggling with PI/Release health and Technical health throughout the organization as most of the teams were transitioning from plan-driven to SAFe . But, during the transition period in Quarter 3, we observed discernible improvements in different areas of SAFe practice adoption. Conclusion: The observed improvement might be due to teams merely becoming more familiar with the practices over-time. However, management had also made some structural changes to the teams that may account for the change.