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 ...
