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Scrum Roles and Responsibilities

Janeve George Posted On July 28, 2011
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Scrum is a agile development technique which makes developing complex software products easier. Scrum values the customer feedback. Prototypes of the product in short intervals so that early customer feedback can be used to deliver higher quality software. Scrum highly relies on a highly motivated, closely collaborating, cross-functional and self-organized teams.

Scrum is not a full process or methodology, it is a framework. It does not provide a complete, detailed descriptions of how everything is to be done. The Scrum team is given the power of deciding how most of the things should be done. The team will know best how to solve the problem as they are presented. This flexibility is the key success factor of the Scrum.

The Scrum Roles

The three core roles of the members of a Scrum team are:

  1. The Product Owner
  2. The Scrum Master
  3. The Scrum Team

The Product Owner

The Product Owner is the visionary of the project and is responsible for:

  • Gathering requirements
  • Managing and prioritizing the Product Backlog
  • Software acceptance
  • Planning the release
  • Understand the value of the project
A product owner is usually a CEO, a Domain Specialist, a Project Manager or even a Business Analyst with technical skills. A Product Owner should ideally have a good balance of following skills:
  • Domain expertize
  • Good technical knowledge
  • A decision maker
  • Easily available to the team

The Scrum Master

When the Product Owner focuses on the value of the project being developed, the Scrum Master focuses on the development process and the mentor for the Scrum team. The key responsibilities of the scrum master are:

  • Planning the Sprints
  • Prioritizing the sprint backlog
  • Team leader
  • Manage the development process
  • Identify and eliminate obstacles that prevent the team from achieving their goals
  • Prepare Burndown charts
  • Ensure crystal clear communication among everyone involved in the project
A Scrum Master is usually the team leader or the project manager. A scrum master should ideally have a good balance of the following skills:
  • Technical expertize
  • Understands the Product Owner’s Vision
  • A good team player and Mentor
  • Understands the teams capablities
  • Motivating and coaching the team
  • Problem solver

The Scrum Team

Do not misunderstand a scrum team with a normal development team. A Scrum team is special in it’s nature and capabilities. The key responsibilities of the Scrum team are:
  • Prioritizing the sprint backlog
  • Estimate the effort to implement User Stories
  • Development to achieve sprint goals.
  • Implementing test cases
  • Unit and initial Acceptance testings
  • Identify obstacles and informing the Scrum Master
  • Self organizing
  • Daily Scrum meetings
A scrum team comprised of cross-functional members who are capable of achieving the sprint goals.This could include software engineers, architects, programmers, analysts, system admins, QA experts, testers, UI designers, etc.  Key skills of a scrum team member should be:
  • Pair Programmer
  • Understands TDD, BDD, etc
  • Understands Code smells and Refactoring
  • Continuous Integration
  • Self-motivated and organized
  • Team player

Ancillary Roles

There are few other roles that also could be a part of the Scrum team. These people do not have any formal role in the team and are only involved in the process infrequently. These ancillary roles are:
  • Stakeholders – Anyone who derives value out of product being developed is a stakeholder. It is comprised of customers, users, customer representatives etc. They have a key involvement during the sprint reviews.
  • Managers – A manager from a different department could get involved in the process now and then for various reasons. Some examples:
    • A sales manager to know the status of the product so that they can schedule their tasks accordingly
    • A tech support manager to understand training materials for the support team
    • A system administrator to understand the type of skill required to be recruited
    • An system architect to understand the deployment architecture requirements
    • etc…
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Author

Janeve George

A Technology Leader, Software Engineer, and Agile Methodologies enthusiast. Currently, working as Lead Software Development with Zeta Suite. He has more than 1.8 decades of experience spanning different verticals predominated by hosting, cloud, and media delivery technologies.

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