Part of the Scrum Master's role is to remove any impediments that are in the way of the team carrying out their work. It's sometimes hard for team members, particularly those new to Scrum, to recognize what is and what isn't an impediment.
For example, if you're waiting for your operations team to set up a staging environment for us to perform user acceptance testing and everything else has been done to this point, then this is impeding the completion of this work.
However, the team might not view this as a problem because it's just the way things have always been done. The Scrum Master has to start to develop a nose for this stuff in order to smell real impediments.
We use the term smells as a metaphor because, just as in real life, the cause of a smell isn't always what we think it is. Using the term 'smell' allows us to sniff out a potential problem without jumping to conclusions or laying blame. If our nose turns out be correct, we can help our team avoid any nasty bumps in the road. If we're wrong, then it's better safe than sorry.
Bad smells for a Scrum Master include, but aren't limited to:
- A team member talking about something they're working on that isn't visible on the Scrum Board
- A team member not speaking at the Daily Scrum
- A small task that should have only taken hours hasn't made any progress in a day or longer
- The Sprint Burndown is tracking to target—normally, a Sprint Burndown tracks up before it tracks down; new tasks are often added when work on a User Story commences, so if the Sprint Burndown is tracking exactly to the expected burndown rate, something fishy is happening.