Impediment

Any obstacle that slows down or blocks a team's progress toward the sprint goal. Impediments can be technical (a broken build), process-related (waiting for a third-party API), organizational (a required approval from a department that is unresponsive), or interpersonal. Team members surface impediments during the daily standup. The Scrum master is responsible for facilitating the removal of impediments — either by solving them directly or by escalating to people in the organization who can. Impediments that are not resolved quickly have compounding effects on velocity and team morale. Tracking impediments and their resolution times is a useful team health metric.