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Roles in scrum are Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Scrum Team. A user story should also break down into smaller pieces called tasks. A task seems to have four phases, namely, definition, assignment, implementation, and following.

Who should do what in Scrum about tasks? Is it the responsibility of scrum master to update remaining hours of a task, or is it the responsibility of the developer (scrum team)? Should developers assign tasks to themselves or is it the responsibility of scrum master accompanied by product owner?

Saeed Neamati
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5 Answers5

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Agile follows several principles. One of them is: Empower people. Because of that tasks should be defined by team and tasks should be selected by team members. Tasks should not be assigned to team member. The team should be self organizing and because of that distribution of hard / easy / interesting / boring tasks should be even.

Scrum master should ensure that team follows Scrum principles. He is not a project manager.

This is theory and it works for mature teams. For Scrum beginners it can be sometimes hard but you should at least insist that team members will select task themselves instead of assign them.

update remaining hours of a task

In my opinion estimating tasks and maintaining remaining time is waste. You did commitment on set of user stories so it doesn't matter how long will each task take. The only important is if user story will be completed or not.

Ladislav Mrnka
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Should developers assign tasks to themselves or is it the responsibility of scrum master accompanied by product owner?

I places where I've worked that have followed Scrum we've done both, though ideally developers should pick their own tasks. Ultimately it doesn't matter as long as all the tasks get done.

There are pros and cons to each approach.

Letting the team pick their own:

  • pros - the team feel ownership of the task, they pick ones they feel they can do a good job on. Ownership is an important aspect of development that a lot of people overlook.
  • cons - some tasks are left until the end when they would be better off done first.

Having tasks assigned:

  • pros - all tasks are considered equally and none are possibly left out.
  • cons - the team members don't necessarily feel ownership of the task.

In real life you need to take a pragmatic approach. There will be times when tasks have to be assigned, but these should be few in number.

ChrisF
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In our scrum process, we do the following:

The tasks are defined by the group of developers, who most likely will be implementing the user story.

At least two developers are responsible for the implementation of a user story, hence they will be assigned to the tasks automatically (if they can work in parallel, they will take a task most suited to them according to their knowledge and personal flavor. Otherwise they will pair program).

Benni
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Who updates remaining hours of a task?

Only the developers can know how much work remains, so they provide the information. Exactly who updates the hours is not important.

Should developers assign tasks to themselves?

Yes. The act of selecting tasks for yourself is powerful because it makes you strongly committed to completing it in a way not possible if someone else would assign it for you.

Martin Wickman
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Scrum Guide

Everything to do with tasks is the responsibility of the team in Scrum. The team will generally come up with a decomposition of stories into tasks during the second half of the sprint planning meeting but new tasks can be introduced or tasks can be removed at any time during the sprint as new information comes to light. In my opinion, this daily feedback loop is an important part of Scrum.

The ScrumMaster is not the team lead or its manager. The role of the ScrumMaster is to facilitate the Scrum process and remove impediments. The ScrumMaster does not assign tasks to developers. The product owner does not assign tasks to developers. The team delivers value to the produt owner (and by extenstion the customer) by implementing the user stories.

The team is responsible for all estimates. So it owns the estimates for the tasks (and stories) on the board.

Guy Sirton
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