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Roles and Responsibilities in a Scrum Team
Below are the roles and responsibilities that you’ll come across in a Scrum team.
Scrum is one of the biggest parts of Agile – the main parts being Scrum, Kanban, and eXtreme programming or XP. All of these things you will come across but scrum is one of the biggest, so this is a really great thing to know about the three core roles and responsibilities that you’ll come across in a Scrum team.
There are three distinct roles in the Scrum environment and they all work together throughout the project.
- The Product Owner
- The Development Team
- The Scrum Master
The Product Owner
- Manages the product backlog, which is the long list of prioritized project requirements.
- The product owner arranges these items from most valuable to least valuable.
- What’s in the backlog and the ordering of the items is transparent to the whole team.
The Development Team
- The Development team is responsible for sizing the requirements of the product backlog and getting work done in each sprint.
- Self-organizing and self-led, and its members are called generalizing specialists (T-shaped team members) because they can often do more than one function on the team, but specialise deeply in one area.
- An ideal Scrum team has no less than five people and no more than eleven people (seven being perfect).
The Scrum Master
- Is the project manager role, but with more focus on servant leadership.
- The Scrum Master ensures that everyone understands the rules of Scrum, removes blockers for the team, facilitates Scrum meetings (stand-ups)
- They also bring in anyone necessary for the whole team approach
- They help the product owner groom the backlog, and communicate the vision of the project to everyone that’s involved.
You may find similar roles on any project or even within any team working towards Scrum and Agile – the principles translate to all types of knowledge work.
– David McLachlan