5.3: Agile Roles and Responsibilities - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->Let us cover Agile roles and responsibilities.</v> Agile team has well-defined roles. Scrum roles are described in "The Scrum Guide." They're focused around three major areas. Agile teams are self-organizing for value delivery. It is important that team members complement each other and they're able to produce value end to end. For example, if a team is involved in software delivery, they have development. Testing, and analytical skills on the team. These skills would be represented by a small number of people as we discussed, five to nine, but there are no specific constraints. Team members actively participate in backlog refinement and have direct access to their customers. The Scrum team consists of a product owner, the team itself, which includes developers, testers, designers, and the Scrum Master. The product owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product. That results from the value and the work provided by the Scrum team. The Scrum team itself includes professionals who do the work and deliver a potentially releasable increment of done product at the end of each sprint. A done increment is required at sprint review. What that means, it means potentially shippable. You can deliver this feature directly to the customer. The third is the Scrum Master. Scrum Master is a servant leader for the Scrum team. The Scrum Master helps everyone change the interactions to maximize the value created by the Scrum team. Servant leader means that this person is leading the team, supporting their value delivery, and at the same time, serving the team. If the team is blocked, for example, Scrum Master supports the team in unblocking. Whether they need any other team to provide data to them or they do not have a person with a specific skill, the Scrum Master is there for them. However, Agile roles are not limited to those three primary roles that are defined in Scrum. In many frameworks, there are other Agile roles, product manager, business analysts, tech lead, and so forth, but first, let us review the primary roles, their differences, and the way they support each other. Let's start with the product owner. According to "The Scrum Guide," the product owner is the sole person responsible for managing the product backlog. Product backlog management includes a number of things. For example, clearly expressing product backlog items, ordering the items in the product backlog to best achieve goals and their mission, optimizing the value of the work the Scrum team is doing. Ensuring that product backlog is visible, transparent, and clear. Ensuring this Scrum team understand the items in the product backlog. Also, the product owner may do this work and include this Scrum team in doing it, but either way, the product owner remains accountable for the quality, health or hygiene as we said, of the product backlog. All of it doesn't mean though that the product owner is the only person who provides input. Representing the customer and being the voice of the customer, the product owner conducts analysis to define customer personas, understand their needs, and combines this knowledge with the deep understanding of the subject matter area, the market, and the business. At the same time, the product owner is a person. It's not a group, it's not a committee. That's a very frequent mistake being done. Based on inputs, the product owner makes prioritization and scope decisions that are related to the product. A very important concept in Agile is having an empowered product owner. Remember we spoke about Marty Cagan's book called "Empowered." It's the book about product management. If a person in this role is not empowered to make decisions, they will not be successful. The organization must respect the decisions of the product owner and the changes of priorities or features should be presented to the product owner for their decisions. In large organizations, there may be product owners on Agile teams and also they could be product managers who are responsible for the product's business functions, profits and losses, business success of the product, marketing, sales, all related activities. This person is responsible for building relationships with the customers and envisioning new products and businesses within the same functionality. The role of the product manager is outside of the boundaries of any delivery framework including Agile and is a very popular role nowadays. An example of a product manager was Steve Jobs who synthesized a deep understanding of customers and their needs with his revolutionary vision. He was always focused on the what and the why rather than how. His vision was a world where everyone had access to the best computers. He also built stories around that vision that got others excited. People who got excited about his vision bought his products and built up on his vision as their own. This is the function of the product manager. To envision, get others excited, and help them make their product their own. Now let's talk about the Scrum Master. The Scrum Master is frequently referred to as Agile project manager. However, there is a fundamental difference between the Scrum Master and the project manager. The project manager is responsible for delivering a project. In this sense, it is a management role where the project manager has to use a command-and-control approach to set up tasks, define timelines, and then follow up on the completion. The Scrum Master role is the opposite. Scrum Master helps everyone understand Scrum theory, practices, rules, values. It's a servant leader role as we discussed. Scrum Master helps the team to be self-organizing and creates high-value products. Scrum Master does this by removing impediments, by promoting Scrum values of commitment, courage, focus, openness, and respect, and in a way by coaching the development team. What are the best Agile practices? The Scrum Master ensures that the product scope, goals, and domain are all understood by the development team and helps the team understand and collaborate with the product owner on the product backlog. Scrum Master is one of the least understood Agile roles and one of the most critical ones. As with good sports coaches, there are good Scrum Masters who make any team successful no matter what they do and where they go. Similarly, there as Scrum Masters who continuously fail in creating a productive, positive Agile environment, and usually, they blame it on their team members or organizational level of Agility, but in reality, there are no bad or perfect teams or organizations. The role of this Scrum Master is to patiently and passionately support their team's and organization's journey to Agility. Scrum Master role is frequently misinterpreted as a facilitator, and almost like a team secretary. Someone who books meetings room, maintains schedules, schedules events facilitates them, maintains repositories, writes action items and notes, and sometimes even manages vacation calendars. This cannot be farther from the intent of the role. The Scrum Master is a coach who educates the team, challenges them so that they don't become complacent, supports team members when they're discouraged or demotivated or lost and leads the team to success when things are hard Scrum Master is a leadership and coaching role as much as it is a servant role to the team and for the product owner.