Scrum master in a global distributed development team

Abstract: Companies around the world work more globally than ever and it reflects in the system development projects that run. The companies work span continents and the employees work together over the borders. This way of working, the global distributed, brings a number of opportunities for the company but also presents a lot of problems. The distributed way of working means that the teams and/or individuals are divided. I wanted to connect this way of working with the agile framework Scrum, partly due to my own interest on the subject and partly as it is a contradiction to me, distributed work and Scrum, therefore a challenge to combine. To be able to investigate this way of working I got in touch with two companies that work globally and distributed, using the Scrum technique, I read literature and papers on the subject to be able to reach my conclusions. My conclusions are based on the success factors I found in both the literature and the dialogs performed. The study shows three important qualities in a leader, a scrum master, in a globally distributed development team: Coaching leadership, clear leadership and smaller distributed teams not individuals.