Specialized Job Roles


Specialized Job Roles

 

Smells

 

A project team has highly specialized job roles or descriptions such as Architect, Designer, DBA, or Tester.

 

Discussion

 

Scrum teams need to have a “we’re all in this together attitude.” This can sometimes be undermined if a team has specialized job descriptions or roles. For example, if a team includes a dedicated “tester” then this may give the rest of the team an opportunity to shirk the responsibility to test. With the highly complex technologies of the world today it is too simplistic to think that everyone can be a DBA and everyone can write server-side J2EE or .Net code. A successful Scrum team does not need to be comprised entirely of generalists. However, for a team of specialists to be successful each specialist must accept general responsibility for the system as a whole. I may not know how to solve our project’s most intricate Oracle problems but I’m going to do whatever I can to help, which may simply include taking on some of our database specialist’s other responsibilities to free her to solve the complex problems.

 

 

Credit: this is based on material from Toward A Catalog Of Scrum Smells by Mike Cohn.