A scrum team is a small and nimble team dedicated to delivering committed product increments. A scrum team’s size is typically small, at around 10 people, but it’s large enough to complete a substantial amount of work within a sprint. A scrum team needs three specific roles: product owner, scrum master, and the development team. And because scrum teams are cross-functional, the development team includes testers, designers, UX specialists, and ops engineers in addition to developers.
The scrum product owner
Product owners are the champions for their product. They are focused on understanding business, customer, and market requirements, then prioritizing the work to be done by the engineering team accordingly. Effective product owners:
Build and manage the product backlog.
Closely partner with the business and the team to ensure everyone understands the work items in the product backlog.
Give the team clear guidance on which features to deliver next.
Decide when to ship the product with a predisposition towards more frequent delivery.
The product owner is not always the product manager. Product owners focus on ensuring the development team delivers the most value to the business. Also, it's important that the product owner be an individual. No development team wants mixed guidance from multiple product owners.
The scrum master
Scrum masters are the champions of scrum within their teams. They coach teams, product owners, and the business on the scrum process, and look for ways to fine-tune their practice of it.
An effective scrum master deeply understands the work being done by the team and can help the team optimize their transparency and delivery flow. As the facilitator-in-chief, he/she schedules the needed resources (both human and logistical) for sprint planning, stand-up, sprint review, and the sprint retrospective.
The scrum development team
Scrum teams get s*%& done. They are the champions for sustainable development practices. The most effective scrum teams are tight-knit, co-located, and usually five to seven members. One way to work out the team size is to use the famous ‘two pizza rule’ coined by Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon (the team should be small enough to share two pizzas).
Team members have differing skill sets, and cross-train each other so no one person becomes a bottleneck in the delivery of work. Strong scrum teams are self-organizing and approach their projects with a clear ‘we’ attitude. All members of the team help one another to ensure a successful sprint completion.
The scrum team drives the plan for each sprint. They forecast how much work they believe they can complete over the iteration using their historical velocity as a guide. Keeping the iteration length fixed gives the development team important feedback on their estimation and delivery process, which in turn makes their forecasts increasingly accurate over time.
