What are the responsibilities of the Development Team in Scrum?

Being a part of a development team is not as easy as other people might think it is. There are a variety of responsibilities that are given to different members of the development team in Scrum. Whatever the tasks or responsibilities each member is given, have to be done on time to avoid any inconvenience. As the dev team is an integral part of the Scrum team, everyone looks on them to perform well. So, let us take a look at the responsibilities of the development team in Scrum.

Responsibilities of development team in Scrum:

The following mentioned are some of the major responsibilities of the development team in scrum that we all should know of:

They have to perform sprint execution:

During the sprint execution, the development team members have to perform all the tasks of designing, building, integrating, and testing product backlog items into a form of potentially shippable functionality. And for this purpose, they have to self-organize and mutually decide how they are supposed to plan, manage, carry out, and communicate the whole work. That is why the development team spends a good amount of time performing the sprint execution. Check out the use of Scrum principles in different domains.

They are supposed to inspect and adapt:

In many of our topics, we have discussed many times that the whole development team members are bound to participate in the daily Scrum. And during this time, the team members have to collectively track their progress toward the sprint goal and then adapt the plan for the whole day’s work. Now, why is it mandatory for the whole development team to take part in the daily Scrum? It is because if any of the team members don’t take part in the daily standup then the team can miss vital pieces of the bigger picture. And this will eventually lead to failure in attaining the sprint goal.

Grooming of the product backlog:

As we all know that in each sprint, the development team has to dedicate a sufficient amount of time to prepare for the next sprint. So, what actually happens is a large part of that work is dedicated to grooming the product backlog. The steps included in it are creating, refining, estimating, and then, in the end, prioritizing the product backlog items.

So in each of the sprint, the development team in scrum has to allocate up to 10% of their overall capacity to assist the product owner with all these activities. If for any reason, the team is not able to assist the product owner to fulfill the purpose, then the end results can never be achieved as wished.

Plan the sprint meticulously:

A sprint planning is the most important part to be done and it takes place at the beginning of every sprint. With the help of the product owner, the development team in scrum establishes the goal for the next sprint. Now all this is also facilitated by the scrum master. The only thing that matters here is to define the goal clearly. Once the goal is clear to everyone, the team is able to determine a high-priority subset of the product backlog items that they should be building to achieve their particular goal.

One thing that should be mentioned here is the time required for sprint planning is found to be directly proportional to the size of the sprint. If the sprint is of longer duration, then the time required to plan the sprint would be more and if the sprint is of shorter duration then the situation would be otherwise. For example, sprint planning duration for a two-week sprint is going to be half a day. Then, if there is a four-week sprint set, then it might need up to a full day to plan the sprint.

Not just that, this planning also follows an iterative pattern and unlike traditional project planning methods, the team never focuses on an elaborate and uncertain plan at the beginning of its development effort. Instead, they make a series of granular, more certain, and detailed plans at the start of each sprint. Thus, all these planning and effort has to be made by the development team.

Inspect and then adapt the product and process:

Towards ending each sprint, the development team has to do two important steps. One is the inspection process and the other one is the adapt activities. These adapt activities include sprint review and sprint retrospective. Now in the sprint review, what happens is that the whole development team, product owner, scrum master, stakeholders, sponsors, customers, and even the interested members of other teams participate. What they do is review the just-completed features of the current sprint and then discuss the whole procedure as to how they can make progress in an efficient way.

Similarly, the sprint retrospective is the part where the Scrum team inspects and adapts its scrum process and technical practices to improve the way it uses Scrum for delivering the best of the business value.

They are self-organizing:

One important role of the dev team is that they are self-organized. No one including the Scrum master tells them what to do. They have to think on their own and make decisions for what to do next to speed up the process.

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Conclusion:

Thus these were some of the very obvious yet important responsibilities of the development team in scrum that they have to perform no matter what. It is because of the hard work of the development team that the scrum team is able to complete and deliver the project on time. That is why the development team is considered to be an important fragment of the scrum team. So, read this article now and understand the roles and responsibilities of a development team in scrum now and don’t forget to stay home, stay safe, and never stop learning.