Do you think it may be OK for a person to have more than one role in a software development company that wants to use SCRUM?
E.g. is it ok/possible if a person is
Which combinations do you think are possible? Do you work in such a team? What should be considered if a person has more than one roles?
Thanks for any hints.
Product owner shouldn't be a developer or project management role; the whole point is to have someone who can accept a result and who is the subject matter expert. If you make them a team member, you're back to making the product developers define the product; this is a Bad Thing. And if you make them the SCRUM master, first, they probably don't have the development background a SCRUM master needs to understand the issues and estimation, and second, they then control the exact processes and products the SCRUM master should be serving as a balance on.
The SCRUM master can certainly take some team member duties, especially in a small team. However, in most cases as the team size grows beyond 3-4, the SCRUM master won't have a ton of time for regualr development work.
[Updated: "SCUM" master a very inconvenient typo.]
Search the archives of the scrumdiscussion list. This has been extensively discussed in the past on there.
All of our scrum-masters are participating team-members and I think that works fine. The process handles differences in productivity really well.
I really think the product owner should be external, but I just believe the teams should have some distance from the product owner.
Our SCRUM master and product owner are the same person, but he's a unique individual who knowns when he's wearing his SCRUM master hat (or Karate Kid headband in this case) he is not the product owner and visa versa.
Oh yeah, and I definitely recommend a Karate Kid headband for the SCRUM master.
Thanks for all your answers. I can't select one of them as the accepted answers, because all are valuable. I'm therefore accepting this answer to remove the reminder from my profile page.