Agile Scrum Roles: What Is the Role of the Development Team?

By Chris Daily

No matter what industry you're in, leaders and business owners will preach the importance of building a strong development team. A Scrum team embraces the scrum framework is comprised of a Scrum Master, Product Owner, and the Development Team. A development team will be built of engineers that can deliver products incorporating an agile software development approach when they're due, based on increments laid out by the members of the scrum team.

The best thing about a development team that embraces the scrum framework is that the members of the development team get to set their own goals and determine when they plan to complete them. Scrum focuses the cross-functional development team on the sprint goal through the Sprint backlog.

Here is the basic role of the development team and what part they play in getting a product out the door.

1. Manage Their Responsibilities

The scrum development team needs to understand their responsibilities and express them through their core values.

They need to be clearly focused and committed to the project they're working on. Every decision they make should be filtered through how it benefits the project. If there are features and side projects they want to work on, those must come after the core elements of the project.

They should also be open to new ideas. A scrum team needs to listen respectfully to one another and act in good faith that the other members of the scrum team know what they're doing.

They also need to have courage. If there's a new concept that they're struggling with, they need to have the courage to power through it in as much as they need to know when to give in.

They should be committed to delivering products on time. It's essential to build morale both within your development team and with your customers for you to have products delivered on time.

They should also be within the scope that you've set. When you promise a product, even a product only to be used in-house, you need to ensure that it's got all the features you said it would. Delivering a subpar product that doesn't have the quality your customers and employees are used to will make you look like you don't know what you're doing.

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2. Team Spirit

Your development team needs to be able to work together and share responsibilities with one another. By adopting the scrum process and the scrum values, the whole team creates a positive working environment. They should be committed to supporting the group and understand that when they work together and move as one, they get more done.

Senior members must commit themselves to assisting and training development team members who are struggling to meet their sprint challenges. Within your development team, those who have more experience should mentor the people who need help to bring the whole development team forward together.

In the end, each member needs to commit to the progress of the scrum team. They should desire for the scrum team to be recognized and support those around them who have done great work rather than toot their own horn.

When people exercise great judgment and their plans bring success, other people should build consensus around them. But they should never be afraid to challenge an idea with something better. Open and honest feedback is essential to a strong development team.

In the end, everyone should be excited to challenge one another to build a stronger development team and to never settle for the bare minimum of completion on projects.

3. Create and Implement Sprints

The development team that you put together is responsible for creating sprints. The first step should be to enumerate tasks and then to be able to prioritize them for by the urgency, based on the amount of need they require.

The sprint starts with sprint planning where the Scrum team (development team, product owner, and scrum master) define the sprint goal and the development team decides on what the composition of the sprint backlog. Following sprint planning, the development team meets for 15 minutes per day to discuss how they are going to complete the work and meet the sprint goal.

At the end of the sprint, scrum teams conduct the sprint review to show their work to stakeholders and others that are interested. The final act of the scrum team is to conduct a sprint retrospective. Members of the Scrum Team are the only ones to attend, and they focus on what went well, what didn't go so well, and what could be improved. Agile teams that regularly conduct retrospectives as part of the software development process have the opportunity to become high performing mature teams.

Throughout the Sprint, the scrum master role will typically facilitate the scrum events, and will help the whole team learn scrum.

Throughout the sprint, if there are questions about a user story or how aspects of the product should function, the product owner should be brought in. There should be an open cycle of feedback between the development team and the product owner to determine what the product needs to have.

The members should be ready to break into small groups or collaborate together to design their attack on a user story. They should be able to agree on a way to approach the problem and make it easy for a given user to complete the task at hand.

When they need help, there shouldn't be any fear of seeking out some guidance on attacking it. When another development team needs help, that guidance should also be available to them.

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4. Challenge the Role

Just because someone has one task within the development team doesn't mean that they have strict boundaries for what they can and cannot do. Everyone should be committed to working together to expand the meaning of their own role in an effort to help others.

Development team members should conduct constructive peer reviews on one another's work with the goal of teaching each other based on experience.

At the end of the day, they need their product to function to the standards that were agreed upon at the start of the project. Fully developing functionality takes time and focus. It requires everyone to move beyond the expectations of their own role.

By reporting their progress daily to the scrum master, the product can be tracked in concrete ways. Products take time to develop and unless everyone is in communications, development team members won't know if their dependencies have been met.

The scrum master is responsible for removing roadblocks but they can't do their job unless everyone is communicating as much as possible.

5. Refactoring

The development team needs to understand the purpose and importance of refactoring. While there are lots of ways write code, the longer your code is, the slower your process will be. There could be loops and unnecessary conversions peppered throughout your code.

Often you won't know what's going wrong with your code until you run it and start seeing bugs.

By refactoring your code, you can clarify and simplify the design of your existing code. The purpose of doing this is to ensure that your code runs better without changing the behavior, other than optimizing it.

Scrum teams have huge amounts of code that gets extended with every iteration of a product. However, with a continuous cycle of refactoring, you can ensure that you're not slowing down your process. You should be able to add functionality without losing the quality of work that you've put into it.

6. They Stay Self Organized

The purpose of carefully organizing a developing team is to ensure that you create a balanced group that can manage itself and stays motivated. When each team member has a role and understands how they impact one another, they can work together to get over challenges.

Your team should be accountable for the work that it produces. If they make a projection to the client or set a scope, they should have the tools to ensure they hit the mark.

The purpose of using a scrum organization style is to ensure that everyone stays motivated. When the team is empowered and trusted to function on its own, lines of hierarchy disappear. The true meaning of the team is allowed to flourish and everyone will help one another to be accountable for themselves.

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7. Checking and Double-checking

Within development teams, you often see people writing code in groups. When you write code on your own, you might forget how every element of the project works together. When you build as a team and have someone overseeing the code, they can tell when you've contradicted other code or have made something redundant.

With one person programming, the other observes and can review lines as they're written. These roles are called the driver and the navigator respectively. The driver sees the road that's laid out ahead of them, but the navigator knows where there could be trouble ahead.

These roles aren't rigid either. Often agile teams of programmers who work well together will switch off. Writing code can be a very isolated experience and have to narrate your work and justify it allows it to make more sense to both the driver and the navigator.

8. They Manage Continuous Integration

The meaning of continuous integration is that the system that's being written is constantly tested for problems. As each new element is checked into the system, tests are run to ensure that no new code breaks the project.

With tools that allow for source control, continuous builds are generated to give each new change the ability to be tested. If one new page of code is checked in and it breaks the new build, the system can be automated to revert to the last successful build.

By managing your project, you can avoid pushing out a product that's laden with bugs and issues.

Your Development Team is the Heart of Your Products

When your development team is happy, you can be sure that it will be easier to make your clients happy. With the work that your development team does to ensure that every line of code is as strong as it can be, your products should be bulletproof. So long as the values of your agile team are all aligned, there's no way, they can support one another to the finish line.

If you want to know learn more about how your scrum and agile teams can learn more about Scrum? Check out AgileMeridian.com or contact us.

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