Scrum – Who Should Define, Assign, Implement, and Follow Tasks?

scrumscrum-mastertaskuser-story

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?

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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.

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Agile – Are project managers useful in Scrum

Maybe you should present things like this:

The project manager did not disappear in Scrum. He is still there. There is three of them now!

The Scrum Master: he manages the process and solve impediments. That was the responsibility of the project manager before.
The Product Owner: he manages the backlog. That was the responsibility of the project manager before when he predicted everything in Microsoft Project.
The Team: self manage its production. Who and how a given user story is converted into a potentially releasable product increment. That was the responsibility of the project manager when he assigned tasks.

How does a Scrum team account for infrastructure tasks in the planning meeting

They're not actually user stories. They're stakeholder stories. Unless the software is actually paid for direct by users, it's rare that a story is created entirely for their benefit.

I give you a couple of examples:

keyworded articles, which allow advertisers to have more effective adverts
CAPTCHAs, which are there to stop moderators having to deal with spam manually.

Most technical stories actually provide a business benefit, but it's rarely for the users. Phrasing them in a different way can help. I normally use Chris Matts' Feature Injection template:

In order to <achieve my goal>
As <the stakeholder who wants the goal>
I want (<some users to do>) <some stuff>.

This explicitly recognises all kinds of stakeholders, including the development team. Now you can phrase your technical stories too, calling out the business benefit:

In order to minimize the risk of deploying something broken
As the team deploying the code
We want to spend a few days on an automated deployment system.

I've written a couple of blog posts on this: They're not User Stories, and Feature Injection and handling technical stories. Hope they help.

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Related Solutions

Agile – Are project managers useful in Scrum

How does a Scrum team account for infrastructure tasks in the planning meeting

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