Pros and Cons of Rotating Scrum Master Role: A Qualitative Study

Scrum has become a very popular software development methodology in recent years. In scrum teams, often the scrum master role is not a full time. Typically, a scrum master either contributes to multiple projects or shares the development effort along with other team members. In this latter situation, it is possible to fix a scrum master for the entire duration of the project or to rotate the responsibility among the team members. Though some practitioners and researchers suggested possible benefits from scrum master role rotation, there are no empirical studies reported in this regard. This paper summarizes perceptions of members of several teams who worked on projects following scrum methodology. As part of a quasi-experiment half of these teams of students of a software engineering course had their scrum master rotated after each sprint, and other half of these teams had a fixed scrum master for the entire project duration. This paper compares perceptions of various team members regarding the pros and cons of rotating the role of scrum master.