[danmaz74]

> You need a trained and certified Master because otherwise people new to Scrum might not know to pick hats

You certainly don't need a certified scrum master. Ideally, the scrum master should be somebody who is already in the team. A scrum master who does just that is really a project manager, and having a project manager is, IMHO, antithetical to doing scrum.

[stephenhuey]

According to scrum, the scrum master is not the product owner and not a member of the dev team, but rather an objective person who does just the scrum master duties, e.g. facilitating when needed, e.g. making sure people are following scrum instead of getting distracted, not stalled by roadblocks, not taking marching orders from more than one product owner, etc. In scrum, the dev team organizes its time after priorities are set. Scrum does not want a scrum master to be a project manager - if you’ve seen that they’re just mixing unnecessary stuff into scrum and scrum is getting a bad rap for that. I don’t see a scrum master as being a full-time job unless they’re working with multiple teams, so it could easily be anyone knowledgeable outside the team who will objectively play the role.

[danmaz74]

In my experience, and from what I remember from my own training, the scrum master can very well be part of the team. Having somebody external, objective, well trained, and available exactly when the team needs him looks very good... but pretty difficult to do in practice.

[ewjordan]

This seems like a great topic for a pre-trospective meeting to discuss the process of how to structure the process to figure out the process.