Is a Scrum Master required to attend the daily scrum meeting?

I came across this question the other day on LinkedIn and I wanted to share my thoughts in a quick post. First, let’s restate a Scrum Master’s role. Basically, the Scrum Master is responsible for guiding a team to follow Scrum’s best practices. In addition, he/she is also responsible for removing any barriers the team might have in preventing the completion of one or more of their tasks. In most cases the Scrum Master will attend the team’s daily scrum meeting but it isn’t absolutely necessary if a team has a good grasp of Scrum’s best practices and is performing well. In those cases, a he/she may check in to the daily scrum every so often and a while to make sure things are still going well.