The Power of Scrum Mastery: An Analysis of Agile Team Performance
and Scrum Master Influence
Hannes Salin
1,2 a
, Felix Albrecht
3
and John Skov
3
1
Swedish Transport Administration, Department of Information and Communication Technology, Borl
¨
ange, Sweden
2
School of Information and Engineering, Dalarna University, Borl
¨
ange, Sweden
3
Independent Researcher, Copenhagen, Denmark
Keywords:
Team Metrics, Agile Software Development, Decision-Making, Scrum Master, Agile Team Performance.
Abstract:
We investigate the level of influence the scrum master role has on a team’s success, in terms of four different
leading indicators: feature lead time, defect leakage, predictability and velocity. We use statistical analysis
on a large data set of agile metrics, collected by the target company, a large corporation in the Nordics. Our
study showed that primarily the presence of a scrum master correlates well with team success for feature lead
time. The remaining three indicators did not show strong statistical correlation with the inclusion/exclusion
of a scrum master. However, these indicators should not be excluded for data-driven decision making, and
need further research to identify obstructive or external factors that may influence either the scrum master’s
presence or the leading indicators’ reliability.
1 INTRODUCTION
Adopting a scaled agile software development ap-
proach is a well used path for larger organizations
today; although there are some challenges such as
change resistance, many organizations seems to drive
towards implementations of the Scaled Agile Frame-
work (SAFe) and similar (Putta et al., 2018). More-
over, there are some indications that the adoption of
SAFe can be demanding and expensive, from both
a resource- and management perspective (Ciancar-
ini et al., 2022). Therefore, the investment and un-
derstanding of different success - or leading - indi-
cators are crucial. Agile ways of working, and in
particular Scrum, have formed an industry de facto
standard to face the challenges of working efficiently
on software development projects (Ereiz and Mu
ˇ
si
´
c,
2019). One of the more important quests for the in-
dustry could then be described as finding ways to effi-
ciently scale agile scrum teams, and understand what
leading indicators drive the agile team towards suc-
cess. A key role in the agile setup, using Scrum as
an example of implementation, is the scrum master,
who facilitates and support the developer team to suc-
cess. In traditional settings, the team are part of a
project, that is typically run by a project manager. Al-
though there are differences between the scrum mas-
ter’s and project manager’s roles, similarities exists
a
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6327-3565
as well (Noll et al., 2017). Also, using agile project
management may lead to several challenges (Marnada
et al., 2022; Sadeh et al., 2022), thus having a role for
the team that facilitates, lead and can provide support
seems to be important. Moreover, using a data-driven
decision making approach in the agile software en-
gineering context, still have areas to research further;
measuring traditional project key performance indica-
tors may not be satisfactory but instead decision mak-
ers and stakeholders need more agile data to consider
(Svensson et al., 2019).
1.1 The Scrum Master and Agile
Software Development Teams
The scrum master (SM) role is typically defined to fa-
cilitate the team, the development process, removing
impediments and ensure the adoption and utilization
of agile principles and values (Noll et al., 2017; Ereiz
and Mu
ˇ
si
´
c, 2019). Using scrum as an agile method
for software development has been shown success-
ful, and team performance is related to project success
factors such as customer satisfaction (Kadenic et al.,
2023). Although the adoption of an agile methodol-
ogy seems to be one success factor in many cases, it
also relates to many different factors such as roles,
team composition, team maturity and more. Hoda
and Nobel conclude several dimensions to consider
to better understand why agile teams perform differ-
Salin, H., Albrecht, F. and Skov, J.
The Power of Scrum Mastery: An Analysis of Agile Team Performance and Scrum Master Influence.
DOI: 10.5220/0012083600003538
In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Software Technologies (ICSOFT 2023), pages 377-384
ISBN: 978-989-758-665-1; ISSN: 2184-2833
Copyright
c
2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
377
ently, when adopting the same agile ways of working
(Hoda and Noble, 2017). However, the inclusion of
a clearly defined scrum master role is not explicitly
stated, although the drive towards autonomy and tran-
sitioning from a manager-driven to team-driven prac-
tice is highlighted.
1.2 Team Success Criteria and Metrics
Team success criteria in the software development
context has been studied extensively; several case
studies can be found, e.g. by Bogopa and Marnewick
(Bogopa and Marnewick, 2022) which showed that
commitment and well-defined goals are among some
of the identified success criteria. Another compre-
hensive survey study was done by Lindsjørn et al.
(Lindsjørn et al., 2016) which conclude that learning
and work satisfaction had strong positive effects on
team performance when perceived by the team mem-
bers. However, compared to traditional (non-agile)
teams, there was a lower level of agreement of what
the evaluation of team performance should be defined.
Depending on perspective, team success can be de-
fined very differently. Therefore, for a better valid-
ity we need to clearly define what success criteria a
team should aim for, in order to measure and corre-
late leading indicators for the success, in particular
adjusted to what is relevant for the organization the
team works in. Thus, using quality metrics for a soft-
ware development project is useful when comparing
team performance and quality; examples of such con-
sidered important metrics are customer satisfaction,
lead time and test coverage (Salin et al., 2022; Mad-
dox and Walker, 2021). These type of metrics, also re-
ferred to as leading indicators, may thus be useful for
indicating output quality, and will be used in our study
- in particular defect fixing measurements. Moreover,
team performance is also considered to analytically
correlate scrum master presence and influence with
success. Agile performance metrics are usually asso-
ciated to temporal factors such as lead time to provide
a value (as in programming code) from idea to pro-
duction, also known as lead time (Weflen et al., 2022).
1.3 Problem Statement
In order to answer the question of how a high perform-
ing agile software development team can be defined,
in terms of agile characteristics, we have identified a
research gap in understanding how the scrum master
role can influence different leading indicators in order
to reach team success. With the strict notion of suc-
cess, defined as the temporal metrics feature lead time
(FLT), velocity and predictability, together with the
quality notion of defect leakage, we investigate what
primary leading indicators a team is sensitive for and
what (if any) correlations there are between such in-
dicators and the inclusion or exclusion of a SM in the
team.
1.4 Contributions
Our contribution consists of the following:
A statistical analysis on team success and leading
indicators, using historical agile data from the tar-
get company.
Without generalization, we provide insights of
what leading indicators can be useful for team
success evaluation in the (scaled) agile context.
1.5 Organization of the Paper
The paper is outlined as follows: in section 2 we de-
scribe related work, and in section 3 we outline the
research method and describe the target company and
data collection methods. In section 4 we provide our
results, including the statistical analysis. Finally, in
section 5 we summarize and conclude our analysis
aligned with our problem statement.
2 RELATED WORK
Ereiz and Mu
ˇ
si
´
c investigated the potential risk of not
having a dedicated SM working in an agile team
(Ereiz and Mu
ˇ
si
´
c, 2019). By using interviews and
online surveys with several different companies they
concluded that agile projects in the form a Scrum,
most likely lead to a higher level of project success
if a SM is part of the team. However, no strong in-
dication of the underlying reasons why the SM is of
that level of importance was concluded.
The multifaceted role of the SM role was studied
using grounded theory (Shastri et al., 2021). From a
comprehensive set of interviews and analysis, it was
concluded that it appears there is a positive associa-
tion between several agile practices (e.g. definition
of done, sprint planning , velocity measurements etc.)
and the presence of a SM in the team. Furthermore, it
appears that as a SM, a significant amount of time is
devoted to facilitating and mentoring. While these di-
mensions may impact the team’s overall performance,
additional investigation is required to evaluate their
effectiveness and compare them to established suc-
cess criteria. Another angle on the topic was elabo-
rated by Strode et al., where agile leadership seemed
to not to be necessarily in one role but shared (Strode
ICSOFT 2023 - 18th International Conference on Software Technologies
378
et al., 2022). Their study proposed a team effective-
ness model for agile teams, ATEM, which includes
different coordinating mechanisms and components,
where shared leadership is one such component.
A previous study conducted in 2017, Kristensen
and Paasivaara used a quantitative research method,
investigating the value received by assigning a SM to
the developer team (Kristensen and Paasivaara, 2021).
They concluded that the real value of a SM was based
on the ability to understand other people. More-
over, assigning an experienced SM to two teams may
lead to improved knowledge-sharing and cooperation,
however, assigning even more teams to a single SM
may increase the risk of not being able to return the
expected value from the SM. Our work therefore build
upon the inspiration of Kristensen’s and Passivaara’s
initial work, whereas our paper address a slightly dif-
ferent problem statement, namely the investigation of
correlating the presence of a SM and team success in
terms of pre-defined success criteria.
3 RESEARCH METHOD
In this section we outline the used research method,
including a target company description and the de-
fined leading indicators (the success criteria).
We use a quantitative research method on histori-
cal data collected over a span of 18 months. The nu-
merical data was continuously collected in the orga-
nization using Jira (Atlassian, 2022), a well-known
(agile) project tracking software. The overall re-
search design consisted of three primary phases: a
data collection phase, a data filtering phase followed
by the analysis phase. The data set consisted of Jira
items with meta data such as type and time informa-
tion. These items on an aggregated level and filtered
into team-levels, provide several agile performance-
related leading indicators, shown in Tab. 1. The anal-
ysis phase consisted of statistical testing, using t-
testing in particular, for investigating differences be-
tween the team performance data of SM-driven teams
and non-SM-driven teams.
3.1 Success Criteria
The chosen success criteria for our study included
good levels of feature lead time, defect leakage, ve-
locity and predictability. These are the indicators
measured and analyzed in the data set. For each in-
dicator the target company defined thresholds which
would be considered success if the indicator reached
that level or above. These indicators are formulated
as follows:
Feature Lead Time: the time for an idea from be-
ing shared, analysed, developed, tested, deployed
and released. FLT thus shows how long it takes
from a request to production. The shorter the lead
time the less the customer or market need to wait,
and the faster adaptation the organisation have,
the lower the risk and cost of missed market op-
portunities; lead time is a well established stan-
dard metric (Petersen, 2010).
Predictability: the accurateness of a delivery fore-
cast. In our context, this refers to a team’s work
items forecasting, i.e. completed features within
i given time frame. The target company defined
that good predictability should improve over time
and stabilize in the 80 -100% area. However,
projects may change and need to be adjusted over
time, hence there are reasons for not seeking to
completely fix the level of predictability.
Defect Leakage: is defined as the defect findings
in a staging environment set up as this context
uses it. In particular the avoidance of defects in
production are of interest, and this metric shows
the quality enhancement and possibly the learning
work from staging deployments. With a steady
amount of releases, a decrease in defect findings
over time in each staging environment would indi-
cate increased quality engineering and higher up-
time of the deployed product.
Velocity: is defined as the aggregated amount of
time between already planned and described fea-
tures, from their starting state to complete state
within a fixed time period. The target company
uses a time span of 12 weeks. The main differ-
ence between velocity and FLT is that velocity
only consider the number of completed features
within the fixed time, hence not considering if the
features has been in the backlog for a long time or
not before started.
3.2 Research Question
Our focus is on the influence a SM may have on a
team’s success, and what relation may exist between a
set of the target company’s chosen leading indicators
and that influence. We formulate our research into the
following research question:
RQ: What relation is there between having a
scrum master role in a team and feature lead time,
predictability, velocity and defect leakage?
Our research concerns only the context of the target
company and should not be considered to be a gener-
alization.
The Power of Scrum Mastery: An Analysis of Agile Team Performance and Scrum Master Influence
379
Table 1: Description of the defined indicators including the pre-defined criteria for success, set by the target company.
Data Description Quantity Criteria
Feature lead time The time between a feature is in the
funnel state and closed state.
Number of days Less than 90
days.
Defect leakage The number of defects identified in a
pre-defined time span.
Number of defects No absolute
value set;
when leakage
is trending
downwards.
Predictability The amount of features completed from
a pre-defined set of committed features
per program increment, i.e. 3 months.
Number of features 80 100%
Velocity The amount of features completed
within a program increment, i.e. 3
months.
Number of features No absolute
value set.
3.3 Target Company Description
The target company is primarily located in the
Nordics with software development teams both co-
located and distributed; Sweden, Norway, Denmark,
Finland (3 sites), Poland (2 sites) and India (4 sites).
With the current implementation of SAFe and portfo-
lio structure, the teams are divided into E2E teams,
platform teams, enabler teams and complicated sub-
system teams. In total 45 teams were included in
the study where 21 teams, denoted G
SM
, had an as-
sociated SM, and 24 teams, denoted G
NONE
without
a SM. The set of all teams is denoted G
ALL
. Team
sizes vary between 3-14 members, with the majority
being on the range 5-9 members. In total G
SM
in-
cluded 197 individuals, and G
NONE
included 207 in-
dividuals respectively. The backlog items of the team
vary from independent deliveries to the majority be-
ing highly interdependent. The environmental setup
for the teams, regardless of location, are the follow-
ing:
There is a product manager (PM) of product own-
ers (PO) available.
If the team have a SM, he/she attend to regular
Scrum of Scrums meetings.
Each team works in the same work management
tool (Jira) on the same level of abstraction; epics,
capabilities, features and user stories.
Each team synchronize 2 week long sprints for 5
iterations before having an aligned innovation, in-
spect and adapt, demo and planning sprint of 2
weeks.
Due to the SAFe structure, all teams are organized
into different agile release trains (ART), sharing over-
all backlogs and work towards the planned portfolios.
The main purpose of an ART is to provide a contin-
uous flow of value to the organization via the virtual
organization of agile teams. In the target company,
a train is not bounded geographically and teams lo-
cated in different countries can be part of the same
ART. The company’s tool for working is Jira and the
teams are using user stories and defect items which
are children items to feature items who are owned by
trains and capture the problem statement and its ben-
efit when solved. These items are handled in Jira by
the teams, and are synchronised in sprints of 2 weeks
with exception of the summer and Christmas break.
The year is divided into 4 program increments (PI) of
12 weeks cadence.
3.4 Data Collection
Jira is used for work and updated accordingly for
information and status for enabling best collabora-
tion on the prioritised problems. The updates are
done manually by the team. Our data collection con-
sisted of querying Jira for all registered meta data in
the portfolios, including user story, feature and epic
items. Jira also provide temporal data such as time
stamps in the item workflows, i.e. when items change
state, e.g. from state in progress to done.
The four metrics we collected was handled as fol-
lows by the teams:
Feature Lead Time: is updated with every update
of state in the feature flow. Some features may
have a slower flow than expected due to updat-
ing lag, however feature update from status im-
plement to validating are automated if all children
stories are moved to status done. The FLT is taken
only when the feature is finalised. The FLT data is
taken as a median or mean per PI. The data points
are counted in the same PI the feature was put to
status done, i.e. where it was finalised.
ICSOFT 2023 - 18th International Conference on Software Technologies
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Predictability: is taken every PI closure as in num-
ber of features done vs committed to be done in
the PI planning 12 weeks earlier. The data point
is taken at the end of each PI as the percentage of
the quotient of features done divided by features
committed to.
Defect Leakage: Defects are created and cat-
egorised based on environment (e.g. pre-
production or production) and other details on the
findings related to how it can be resolved. A found
defect may be communicated by the team, exter-
nal users or via the PO, and usually it is the team
that insert the defect into Jira. Defect data points
are added per finding in the PI and later aggre-
gated.
Velocity: is updated with every feature update into
state done, released during a the PI of their clos-
ing, i.e. the difference in time stamps between the
starting point of the feature’s implementation sta-
tus and complete closure.
3.5 Data Filtering
After collecting all meta data from Jira and exported
into data sets, we applied data filtering according to
the following criteria:
1. If there is a a dedicated person as a SM more than
50% of the time it is categorized as G
SM
, other-
wise G
NONE
.
2. If the team was not delivering features of working
code it was excluded from the data set.
3. If the a team had less than 3 members over a whole
year it was excluded from the data set.
The final data filtering was exported into a single data
set for the analysis phase. Moreover, the absolute val-
ues of the data was converted into percentages for pri-
vacy reasons.
3.6 Statistical Analysis
In order to ensure statistical significance we used the
t-test on the data sets. The value for significance set at
α = 0.05 (statistically significant) and α = 0.01 (sta-
tistically highly significant). The t-test is used to com-
pare means between two data sets to test whether two
groups are different from one another. The two tailed
t-test is used to indicate if one group is deviating from
the other group in any direction, while the one tailed
t-test is used to indicate if there is a deviation in one
direction. This study uses the two tailed t-test for test-
ing the significance of difference between a subset of
the team data set with the whole data set. We then use
the one tailed t-test for testing the significance of dif-
ference between two subsets (partitions of the whole
set G
ALL
), namely G
SM
and G
NONE
. If the p-value is
below 0.05, significant difference can be claimed.
4 RESULTS
In all results, the analyzed time period was 18 months
(the x-axis), which corresponds to 6 PI:s (PI 14 to PI
20), each being 12 weeks long. Results in Fig. 1 show
the level of predictability for the amount of features
done from a pre-set of committed features per PI, i.e.
3 months, over the total length of 6 PI:s. The blue
line G
ALL
is the whole data set with all teams, while
the orange line is the subset G
SM
and the grey line
is the subset G
NONE
. The result is presented in per-
centage on the y-axis. The predictability results of the
whole set shows that 5 out of 6 PI occurrences lies
within the aimed 80 100% accuracy, with a slight
downward trend. Overall, this results clearly shows a
solid performance on an aggregated level. Both teams
with and without SM, reach this target 4 out of 6 times
with slight variations in time.
Fig. 2 shows median lead time for the number
of features done per PI, i.e. 3 months, over 6 PI:s.
The median is standardized against the company’s
FLT target value. The unit on the y-axis is shown
in percentage of projected days to complete the fea-
tures divided by the target value. The FLT ranges
from slightly below 100 to 160 percentage of the com-
pany’s target value, while being trending downwards
in the total data set as well as the G
SM
and G
NONE
sub-
sets. With the exception of PI 16 and 17 these subsets
are moving in lockstep. PI 16 has a raise for G
NONE
,
which seems to precede the G
SM
data set raise in PI
17. The results in Fig. 3 show defect leakage for pro-
duction defects divided by test environment defects
per PI, i.e. 3 months, over 6 PI:s. The result is shown
in percentage on the y-axis. The results indicate that
Figure 1: Feature predictability filtered on G
SM
and G
NONE
,
measured in achieved percentage.
The Power of Scrum Mastery: An Analysis of Agile Team Performance and Scrum Master Influence
381
Figure 2: Feature lead time filtered on G
SM
and G
NONE
.
there may be a quality progress in the staging work by
reducing the amount of defects found over time. One
interpretation would be that both team subsets shows
an improving trend of reducing the amount of defect
in their staging over time.
In Fig. 4 we show the result as in the number of
defects, as a percentage compared to the defects of
the whole set in PI14 G
ALL
(PI14), on the y-axis. The
number of defects are roughly stable with an excep-
tion of PI 14 and 19, being somewhat lower and a
slight overall downward trend.
Results in Fig. 5 show delivered features per PI,
i.e. 3 months, over 6 PI:s. The result is shown in the
number of features compared to the G
ALL
(PI14) ve-
locity. The velocity shows a upward trend with the
exception of a drop in PI 18 which was related to
a down-scaling organisational change which affected
only teams with SM.
4.1 Comparative Analysis
In this section we provide a comparative analysis of
the results presented in Sec. 4. If we compare the vari-
ations of predictability shown in Fig. 1 there seems
to be no relation. Comparing the de-facto value per
timestamp, the two subsets are not showing a clear
difference or related pattern. Both G
SM
and G
NONE
Figure 3: Defect leakage ratio from test to production envi-
ronments filtered on G
SM
and G
NONE
.
Figure 4: Absolute number of defects as percentage com-
pared to the total number of defects found, filtered on G
SM
and G
NONE
over PI14 to PI20.
Figure 5: Feature velocity per PI filtered on G
SM
and
G
NONE
.
have better and worse values in comparison to each
other and to the total set. Moreover, the total FLT
seems to be more related to the G
SM
data set which
makes sense as the SM-teams deliver more features
per PI (seen in Fig. 5).
Comparing FLT between G
SM
and G
NONE
, the
graphs suggest that team with SMs have consistently
a faster FLT than non-SM teams. We computed a p
value of 0.002301 in the statistical analysis, which
indicates high significance. Even comparing the SM
teams with the total set of teams’ FLT has a p-value
of 0.011899, i.e. a significant difference. Consider-
ing that the target company expectation is a FLT rep-
resented in the graph as 100% and below, only the
teams with a SM achieve that intent in 4 out of 6 PI:s.
When comparing the defect leakage between G
SM
and G
NONE
, the teams with a SM are with the ex-
ception of one PI, ahead two times rather close dis-
tance, and the other PI:s up to 25% less leakage.
However, the statistical analysis with the computed
p-value of 0.125383 shows the difference as non-
significant. Next, comparing the two subsets, G
SM
have a higher amount of defects than the teams with-
out a SM, which could make sense considering that
teams with a SM produce more features; see Fig. 5.
The noteworthy difference is the downward trend for
teams with a SM compared to stable or even a slight
ICSOFT 2023 - 18th International Conference on Software Technologies
382
upward trend for teams without SM. This data could
suggest a higher ability to learn and improve in teams
with SM compared to non SM, but would require a
more qualitative analysis for validation.
Finally, when comparing the velocity between the
two groups, we note that it can be difficult to make
clear interpretations. It is more difficult compared to
the other metrics, since velocity is related to the num-
ber of teams and people, and therefore can potentially
be faulty expressed in ”more people - more features”.
However, in the time period for the collected data, ap-
proximately the same amount of individuals (around
200) for both groups were included. We chose to take
a more cautions stand towards this metric since it is
fairly easy to ”game” the data by teams that want to
please a stakeholder by closing the desired number
of features that is expected, although all tasks are not
completed (Levison, 2022).
4.2 Discussion
We have collected and analyzed data which can be
used to resolve the RQ. Our concluding analysis is
the following: considering the pre-defined team suc-
cess criteria and comparing how teams with a SM
have performed, versus teams without a SM, the
major significant difference is in the FLT indicator,
where teams with a SM deliver significantly faster
than teams without a SM. Therefore, it shows a higher
degree of team success when measured against FLT;
teams with a SM thus succeed in the company de-
fined ambition of delivering enough amount of fea-
tures within one PI. Nonetheless, the data does not
offer insights into the effectiveness of an SM’s role
execution. Consequently, a more detailed examina-
tion of SM performance could potentially yield a finer
and more precise analysis. Moreover, the threshold of
defining a team in G
SM
as a team with a SM at least
50% of the time would also affect the analysis if con-
sidering the SM performance as well, hence we leave
that type of analysis as proposed future work.
Predictability seem to be related between the two
groups and both groups also succeed most of the
time with the ambition of delivering in the range of
80 100% of committed features. However, team
success in terms of predictability seems to not be re-
lated to the SM role. For the defect leakage crite-
ria, there seemed to be a stronger relation for teams
with a SM to perform more successfully, but the dif-
ference was statistically non-significant. Again, team
success seems to not be related to the SM role. How-
ever, looking at the total amount of defects, the data
may suggest that the SM role enhance the teams abil-
ity to learn (by fixing defects) in terms of decreasing
defects, which leads to better results in defect leakage
particularly. We hypothesize that this metric also im-
ply a higher level of product quality and other positive
downstream effects.
To summarize, G
SM
have clearly a benefit in terms
of FLT as a success criteria and should therefore be
considered when building and developing agile soft-
ware development teams. Moreover, we have identi-
fied further areas to be investigated using qualitative
research, such as the ability to learn from previous de-
fect fixing and what factors that hinders or incubates
the learning. From the perspective of data-driven de-
cision making, our findings offer valuable informa-
tion on how decision makers in the delivery organi-
zation, such as project- and management levels, can
gather and utilize the analyzed indicators.
5 CONCLUSION
In our study the role of a SM had a significant impact
on the team success in terms of delivering features, at
the target company. We also see indications of what
could be the increased ability of learning for develop-
ing software with higher quality in teams who were
facilitated by the role of a dedicated SM, however,
to validate this further, a qualitative study is neces-
sary. Despite no strong correlation was found for pre-
dictability and defect leakage, with having a SM or
not in the team, these metrics are still valid and im-
portant metrics to consider since they provide insights
to progress and development of the team. We thereby
conclude that a SM is still a key component of a team,
and that all investigated success factors give valuable
insights of teams’ performance, but FLT is the most
important to consider in terms of success criteria.
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