What is it like to have a Great Scrum Team?

Scrum is a proven way to address complex adaptive problems and deliver products with the highest possible value. A good Agile and Scrum training is the key to yield the best results. A great Scrum team comprises of a Development team focused on delivering high-quality product increments, a Product Owner maximizing value and a Scrum Master enabling continuous development.

Let’s take a deeper look at each of these.

Product Owner

The Product Owner maximizes product value and the work of the development team. They bring forward the customer’s perspective of the product to the Scrum team. They are also responsible for developing and maintaining a market strategy and product vision, product management, product backlog, and involving stakeholders. Here, we will talk about the role of a Product Owner.

• Embraces and socializes the product vision: Together with the stakeholders, they create a product vision which represents the customers’ voice. They always have this vision in the back of their mind while taking decisions for greater product success.
• Prioritizes the product backlog: A balanced backlog is created taking into account the priority, risk, learning opportunity, value, and dependencies.
• Masters the user story mapping: The visualization adds a second dimension to the product backlog.
• They are well versed with modelling techniques: They know when and how to apply a specific model like Lean Startup, Impact Mapping, or Business Model Generation.
• Meets customer expectations: A great Product Owner knows that the ultimate goal of Scrum is customer satisfaction and works accordingly.
• Is empowered to take decisions: They swiftly take important decisions for a sustainable pace of the development team.
• Focuses on Functionality: To maximize value, their main focus is always on functionality as functionality brings values.
• Is available: Valuable information is provided and important questions answered on time.
• Is a mini CEO: They focuses on business values, opportunities, and return on investment.

The Scrum Master

A Scrum Master makes sure that Scrum is understood and enacted well by the team. They are servant-leaders who ensure that the team strictly follows the Scrum theory, rules and practices. Undergoing an Agile and Scrum certification is one of the ways in which professionals can gain Scrum Master roles.

A great Scrum master plays the following roles:

• Coach: Focussing on mindset and behaviour, they coach individuals and the team to collaborate well and improve continuously.
• Servant Leader: They serve the customer and fulfil the needs of the team members.Sticking to values and goals, they lead the team to achieve results satisfying the organization’s business objectives.
• Facilitator: Set the stage and provide clear boundaries for the team to collaborate.
• Conflict Navigator: They address dysfunctional and unproductive attitude.
• Manager: They manage the process, the team’s health, impediments, boundaries,culture, and eliminate waste.
• Mentor: Transfer their Scrum knowledge and guide the team.
• Teacher: Teach the theory and practices of Scrum and make sure that they are understood and implemented correctly.

The Development Team

Development team delivers potentially shippable increments at the end of each product. These are professionals of the organization structured and empowered to be a team.

They are:

• Self-organizing: They transform the Product Backlog items into working solutions.
• Cross-functional: All the skills required to create a product increment are inherent in the whole team.

They have:

• No special titles: Each member of the team is a developer.
• No sub-teams: They collectively work towards the Sprint goal delivering the best quality increments at the end of each Sprint.

A great development team:

• Strives for technical excellence: They use extreme programming which revolves around the best practices in planning, designing, coding, and testing. They practice pair programming, refactoring, continuous integration, unit and acceptance testing.
• Applies team swarming: Many people work simultaneously on just a few items at a time and finish it as quickly as possible.
• Uses spike solution: A spike is used to discover work needed to conquer a large ambiguous task. Concise and time-boxed spike experiments are used to solve challenging technical, design or architectural problems.
• Criticizes ideas, not people
• Respects the Boy Scouts Rule: That is, leave the campground cleaner than you found it.In software development terms, leave the code base in a better state than when you found it by cleaning up messy codes.
• Share experiences: Can be shared with your peers, or even in seminars and conferences.
• Ensures a healthy dose of fun at the workplace every day.
• Knows their customer: They make the right technical decisions because they know what exactly their customer wants
• Manages team composition
• Trust each other
• Practices collective ownership.

All Set?

With our guide to a perfect Scrum team, we hope that you will work towards achieving it and you’re all set for success to come your way!

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