Scrum defines 3 roles - scrum master, product owner and the team.
A product owner is charged with shaping the product, making decisions about future development that best serves the customers.
A scrum master acts as a coach, guiding the team to follow good technical and Scrum practices, setting the team up for success.
But what is the team responsible for? Here are some thoughts:
Meet sprint commitments - A Scrum team defines the scope of an iteration by committing to a limited set of the product backlog. It is important that the team exhibits reasonable predictability in meeting these commitments. This gives external parties the confidence that the team can deliver on what it says. This type of confidence usually entails high independence for the team.
Identify issues early, mitigate risk - A Scrum Master can facilitate this, but it is primarily up to the team to identify and communicate issues that can derail the sprint commitments. Knowing about issues early gives the team time - to swarm, or get help from external parties, or negotiate story scope. This applies not only to sprint commitments, but also to product itself. The team is best suited to identify issues as it builds the product. Communicating issues early on is a great first step to mitigating any risk.
Knowledge creation and sharing - The goal of each sprint is two-fold: build increments to the product, and create knowledge. Learning is an important part of sustaining agility. Knowledge creation and sharing can include things like understanding the business better, or advancing knowledge of the technology within the team.
Unit and Automation Tests - The team is responsible for prioritizing creation / maintenance of unit test suite and automation test suite. As the product grows in size, it takes more and more time for manual comprehensive testing. In order to sustain good pace of development, unit tests and automation tests are critical.
Respect each other - This includes things like being punctual, actively participating in daily Scrums, retrospectives and planning meetings. A healthy team is one, that can bring up and acknowledge problem areas. This cannot be done if team members don't respect each other.
Assist each other - Going down a path of "this is my story" and "that is your story" is setting yourself up for failure. The team, the scrum master and the product owner are all in it together. They need to take the time to assist each other to meet their sprint commitments. Assisting each other goes a long way in raising the overall skill level on the team.
Communication - Each team member is responsible for making sure they keep the right set of people in the loop on the tasks they are working on. At a minimum, each team member should keep the Scrum Master in the loop so that s/he can facilitate communication with other people.
Delivery of high quality product - Quality begins at the source. It is important for each person on the team to take ownership of quality for what they are building. With measures like code reviews, manual and automated tests, the team is responsible for delivering a high quality product. No matter how quick the turn-around from an idea to finished product, if quality is sub-par it is destined to fail.
Continuous Improvement - Last and certainly not the least, the team is responsible for asking the question - "how can we do this better?" This is key to greatness!
One of the most important tasks in doing Agile is to understand how to be a part of the team. Having some guidance on what that means can make the job a little bit easier.
| Rate this post! |
☆
|
☆
|
☆
|
☆
|
☆
|
