An Example Checklist for ScrumMasters
Michael James
(mj4scrum@gmail.com)
14 September 2007
(Revised 24 July 2012)
A Full Time Facilitator?
An adequate ScrumMaster can handle two or three teams at a time. If you're content to limit your role to
organizing meetings, enforcing timeboxes, and responding to the impediments people explicitly report, you can
get by with part time attention to this role. The team will probably still exceed the baseline, pre-Scrum expectation
at your organization, and probably nothing catastrophic will happen.
But if you can envision a team that has a great time accomplishing things no one previously thought possible,
within a transformed organization, consider being a great ScrumMaster.
A great ScrumMaster can handle one team at a time.
We recommend one dedicated ScrumMaster per team of about seven, especially when starting out.
If you haven't discovered all the work there is to do, tune in to your Product Owner, your team, your team's
engineering practices, and the organization outside your team. While there's no single prescription for everyone,
I've outlined typical things I've seen ScrumMasters overlook. Please mark each box with √, ∆, ?, or N/A, as
described on the last page.
Part I -- How Is My Product Owner Doing?
ScrumMasters improve Product Owner effectiveness by helping them find ways to maintain the Product Backlog
and release plan. (Note that only the Product Owner may prioritize the backlog.)
☠Is the Product Backlog prioritized according to his/her latest thinking?
☠Are requirements and desirements from all stakeholders captured in the Product Backlog? Remember: the backlog is emergent.
☠Is the Product Backlog a manageable size? To maintain a manageable number of items, keep things more granular towards the top, with general epics at the bottom. It's counterproductive to overanalyze too far past
the top of the Product Backlog. Your requirements will change in an ongoing conversation between the
developing product and the stakeholders/customers.
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