Roles, Roles, Agile Roles - Who does what on a diverse Agile team?

So who does what? Roles and responsibilities. In Scrum, Scrum Master (facilitator and helper), Product Owner (voice of the customer), and team members. 

Core Roles

Scrum Masters are team facilitators. Scrum organizations define the Scrum Master role as strictly in the facilitator area and not coding or providing coding direction. Scrum masters don't have development tasks to perform. They focus on removing roadblocks, coaching, working agreements, and helping the team to perform better through process improvement.  

Product Owners are the voice of the customer, keeps stakeholders happy, prioritizes user stories, establishes a product roadmap, builds story maps, market research, benchmarking the Product against the competition, and plays a strategic role. 

Team Members understand requirements, design, development, test, regression testing, and deployment. Not all team members can code.

Developers are team members that like to solve puzzles and problems. They build, configure, create, and deploy the solution.

Indirect Roles 

Stakeholders (customers, users, sponsors), vendors, and a Scrum Guidance Body (SGB) are indirect roles that don't interact with the team on a daily basis but are heavily involved in the solution. Here's a great article which talks bout these indirect roles - Learn more

Specialty Roles

Business Analysts work with the Product Owners around a broader analysis perspective by looking more globally in the organization where the Product Owner focuses on a specific product. Process expertise, data analysis, business rule, architecture, security, strategy, and other types of analysis provide a broader perspective than stakeholders. The Business Analyst removes the Product Owner's blind spots.

The Project Manager role works with the scrum master to help facilitate the team's velocity, coordinate with the team on issues and risks, focus on team continuous improvement, and report status. The PM escalates more significant problems and risks to the executive leadership.

Quality Assurance and Control role creates a test strategy and approach, determines what types of testing are needed, coordinating test execution, capturing test results, coordinating defect log and bug fixes, and communicates on testing progress.

Release Management works with team members to deploy new capabilities and features to the customer by utilizing organizational change management, coordination of deployment communications, managing release trains by consolidating multiple teams into a single deployment, final quality checks and testing, overseeing deployment packaging, and handoffs to customer support.

Roles, Roles, and More Roles

The biggest challenge with all these different types of roles is to have them work together effectively. We highly recommend creating a working agreement which elaborates each roles responsibilities and deliverables to the team. This will help everyone on the team understand how to interact with each other effectively.