Victor Szalvay presented a nice piece on the process facilitator role and whether that role can be time-split with other roles on the development team.

I believe Victor makes some good arguments, but I think it is only realistic in theory. On small teams and in early-stage company environments - everyone wears many hats. One of the engineers takes on the "build guy" role. Everyone pitches in with the testing roles. Etc.

In the book Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development by James Coplien and Neil Harrison, there are some well known patterns that are shared roles or developer centric - the Architect Also Implements pattern is key in assuring the implementation matches the architecture. The Developer Controls Process pattern assures that the developer is at the center of the communication channel and having the process facilitator being a developer would be in alignment with this pattern.

Furthermore, Victor identifies a primary reason for not sharing these roles is due to task switching. I agree with the premise that engineers require heads down concentration time for extended periods of time to make good coding progress and that disruptions should be minimized. In this case, all of the issues they will be helping facilitate will be within the context of their iteration that they are an engineer on. Thus all of the task switching is within a single realm. In my experience, a majority of task switching issues arise when there are completely separate contexts between the tasks - (e.g. iteration development and customer support issues on two different code bases). Thus it would not seem out of line that task switching in this case is a strong argument.

Rather, I would like to propose a different, but related, question - can the process facilitator (e.g. Scrum Master) role in an agile team be part-time? This is not the same as a full time process facilitator sharing their role across multiple teams - in which they are in the office full time. Nor is this the same as a team member/process facilitator shared role where they are in the office full time (as discussed by Victor).

The reason I distinguish between part-time and full-time in the office is due to the times they are not in the office. Issues, discussions, changes, etc. are happening continuously. How does a part-time facilitator keep up when they are in the office only 1/2 time? Who facilitates in their absence? Do you incorporate an apprentice, lead engineer or architect role to assist? How much time is required? 1/2 days every day? 2 days a week?

I would like to hear from other's who have had positive or negative experiences with a part-time process facilitator on an agile team.