I am supposed to be doing some  blogs on scaling agile, but I was distracted by being very lazy.

But sort of on topic – people often ask me “what are the roles in agile and what are their responsibilities?”

I usually say there are three roles – product owner, team assistant and team member.  People ask me about Scrum Masters and I often say that it is really “Scrub master” for “person who scrubs up for the team”.  But whether I call them iteration manager, team assistant, scrum master or something else, it is a key role.

Then people often ask about testers and BAs … and I say they don’t really need them in agile, unless they do need them.  This seems to annoy people more than help them but I think a lot of agile coaches are giving people the same generic answers.

So here is a slightly different answer.

Agile teams are self organising so the team might invent different roles based on their own context.  Similarly, the team might need front end developers, or llama herders or configuration experts, but agile won’t tell you that … because the roles in your team depend on the kind of work you are doing.

In a typical project, I often find myself looking to fill these roles, even if I have people performing more than one of them:

Continue reading “What are the typical role descriptions in agile?”