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Agile Scrum Team Roles: This is my fourth article on Scrum learning, and today, as part of this Scrum learning, I have chosen the various Scrum roles available, and we follow the “three roles hierarchy” in my Scrum practice.
Key Highlights: Agile Scrum Team Roles
- Various roles available in the Scrum
- What are the roles and responsibilities of the product owner in Scrum?
- What are the roles and responsibilities of the Scrum Master in Scrum?
- What are the roles and responsibilities of the Scrum Team?
- Recommended scrum development team size
Scrum Team Roles: Agile Scrum Roles and Responsibilities
There are top 3 roles in the scrum, which are as follows:
- Product Owner
- Scrum Master
- Scrum Developer (Development Team)
Scrum Team Roles: Product Owner Responsibilities
In the hierarchy of roles, this guy will be at the top. He advocates for stakeholders and is the voice of business people, stakeholders, etc. The new requirements get added to the product backlog by the product owner.
When the business team or stakeholder comes across a new requirement, first they will take the discussion forward with the product owner, and then the product owner creates the new requirement either as a new feature in the epic or a user story in the existing feature.
Further, the product owner takes this new requirement forward with the Scrum Master and Scrum development team.
The product owner is primarily responsible for Sprint planning, grooming, review, and the retrospective meeting.
The product owner plans a new sprint along with the Scrum development team, and in between running the sprint, she conducts the sprint grooming meeting, followed by a sprint review and retrospective meeting.
In general, we can have the below bullets when we talk about the product owner’s roles and responsibilities:
- defining the short-term and long-term vision for the team.
- Managing the product backlog (primary responsibility)
- Prioritizing and ordering work items in the product backlog
- Tracks sprint progress towards product release.
- Ensure user stories are “ready” for development to start work by writing a detailed description.
- ensures users have acceptance criteria.
- ensures that the severity of the user stories is set.
- Define customer needs and the associated features to meet those needs.
- advocates on behalf of the customer for the development team.
- If the sprint progress does not go well, the product owner has the authority to move the user story from the sprint backlog to the product backlog.
- The product owner has complete authority if the sprint completely deviates from the actual plan.
- The product owner should have good technical and functional knowledge of the product and should be able to assist with development if necessary.
Scrum master responsibilities: What are the roles and responsibilities of the scrum master in scrum?
The scrum master role comes after the product owner role. He is the second-most important man in the scrum pillar. If we compare the traditional way of team formation, the scrum master can be compared to the team leader, which is not exactly true but is close enough for our purposes. In simple terms, he is the go-between for the scrum development team and the product owner, and he will always support the product owner. Before the sprint planning meeting, he gets ready for all scrum events like planning, daily standup, grooming, review, and the retro meeting. And also, update the capacity and velocity planning, then hand over this process to the product owner in the planning meeting.
In general, we can have the following bullet points when we talk about the scrum master roles and responsibilities:
- arranging daily stand-up meetings.
- To ensure the burndown graph in the VSTS tool is correct, he should frequently monitor this graph.
- removes impediments or obstacles if the team has any.
- ensures that the team has the necessary resources to be effective and productive.
- ensures no tasks or user stories have been added to the sprint backlog by any of the team members after the planning happened.
- Establish and maintain good collaboration and relationships among the scrum development team.
- Coordinate with the team members if they face any technical challenges.
Agile Scrum Team Roles: What are the roles and responsibilities of the Scrum Team?
This is the core scrum team, or development team, that does the planned sprint tasks.
The main roles and responsibilities of the scrum team are as below:
- Work on the planned user stories and tasks.
- Keep the scrum master and team updated about the ongoing work.
- Actively participate in scrum daily standup meetings, bring impediments to the table if they have any, and keep the team transparent.
- Actively participate in scrum planning, reviews, and retrospective meetings.
- Help the scrum master and product owner organise the backlog.
- The scrum team should be self-organizing.
- The ideal scrum team is recommended as being cross-functional with all the skills as a team necessary to create a product increment.
- Individual development team members may have specialized skills and areas of focus, but accountability belongs to the development team as a whole; this should be the common goal of an ideal team.
Recommended Scrum Development Team Size (Roles in the Scrum Framework)
The ideal size for development is between 3 and 9 people, not including the scrum master and product owner; however, this is not mandatory; it depends on the team, scrum master, and product owner, and moreover, it depends on the product you are planning to work on. In a big team, managing the communication will be complex and cumbersome, so try to keep the team size small to medium.
Summary: Agile Scrum Team Roles
Thus, in this article, we have learned the following with respect to various roles and responsibilities in the scrum:
- Scrum has a variety of roles available.
- What are the roles and responsibilities of the product owner in Scrum?
- What are the roles and responsibilities of the Scrum Master in Scrum?
- What are the roles and responsibilities of the Scrum Team?
- Recommended scrum development team size
See Also: Roles in scrum framework
You may also like the below Scrum articles:
- Story point calculation in Scrum
- 5 Scrum events and ceremonies
- Artifacts in Scrum – Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, Increment Backlog
- Understanding the fundamentals of scrum in agile – scrum vs. waterfall
- What is a Scrum Master?
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