We have a professional Scrum Master consultant [*] who recently joined our project. Unfortunately, we don't know her name (she never introduced herself to us, she just came in one day and said "we are having a daily stand-up"), and she doesn't seem to do much else except chair a daily stand up meeting – when I half-jokingly asked her to also give daily feedback in the meeting, she was quite affronted, saying it's the Scrum Master's job to "facilitate, not participate".
This seems fairly anti-Agile (having worked on other agile projects, where the teams were self directed), which is supposed to be egalitarian, but I am not sure about how it works in the Scrum Methodology. I suspect she doesn't do much all day, and that's the reason for her defensiveness on this issue.
Does the Scrum Master take part in the "yesterday, today, impediments" spiel during the stand-up meeting, or is their role to just chair ("facilitate") the meeting?
[*] We weren't actually told what her job is, we just assume, since she calls herself the Scrum Master
Best Answer
Ideally, the scrum master is responsible for facilitating the project activities and to address any sort of impediments faced during that. He/she does not participate in the "yesterday, today, impediments" spiel during the daily stand-up per se, however, is answerable to the team members for any kind of status on the impediments they have reported during the earlier stand-ups.
I have worked with 5 scrum teams with a reputed organization, all of them followed the same practice.
To get a detailed picture of all the responsibilities of a scrum master, I recommend you have a look at this http://www.scrummasterchecklist.org/pdf/ScrumMaster_Checklist_12_unbranded.pdf