Team Member Role and Responsibilities
Scrum encourages teams to learn through experiences, self-organize while working on a problem, and reflect on their wins and losses to continuously improve.
Scrum has three roles: product owner, scrum master and the development team members.
The development team: Redefining “developer”
The development team are the people that do the work. So, that means the ‘developer’ role in Scrum means a team member who has the right skills, as part of the team to do the work.
The development team should be able to self-organize so they can make decisions to get work done.
The development team’s responsibilities include:
Delivering the work through the sprint.
To ensure transparency during the sprint they meet daily at the daily scrum ( sometimes called a standup).
The product owner: Setting clear direction
It is the responsibility of the product owner to ensure that the Agile team are delivering the most value. The product owner should not only understand the customer, but also have a vision for the value the scrum team is delivering to the customer.
The product owners responsibilities are:
Managing the scrum backlog - This does not mean that they are the only one putting in new product backlog Items into the backlog. But ultimately they are responsible for the backlog that the development team pulls to deliver from.
Release management - The sprint is not a release cycle, but instead a planning cycle. It is important for the product owner to know when things can and should be released.
Stakeholder management
The scrum master: Holding it all together
The scrum master help the product owner define value, the development team deliver the value, and the scrum team to get to get better.
The scrum master focuses on:
Transparency - The scrum master is tasked with ensuring that the scrum team works in a transparent way. Examples include creating story maps and updating Jira task, confluence pages with the retrospective ideas.
Empiricism - Empirical process is not easy and requires the scrum master to coach the scrum team on breaking down work, describing clear outcomes and reviewing those outcomes.
Self Organization - Telling a development team they can self organize does mean that the team will self organize. In fact self organization comes over time and requires help and support.
Serves product owner - The scrum master serves the product owner in sprint planning and sprint reviews ensuring that value is clearly being described and direction set.
Serve development team - Scrum master serve the development team in the daily scrum(standup) by ensuring that work is happening and that blockers are being removed. They also take responsibility for blockers that are outside of the the teams ability to resolve.
Map scrum role to your own job title
In our company current job role mapped as:
Software Engineer, Senior Software Engineer, Lead Software Engineer/Team Lead, QA, UI/UX designer, DevOps or any other technical role will play role as Developer in scrum.
Currently CTO playing role as Scrum Master, sometime proxy of Product Owner also Developer in scrum.
CEO managing Product Owner role in scrum.