Agile development has a few roles that people will be playing. Those roles define certain responsibilities that the parties involved will need to take on. Each role serves an integral role in the development process.
Product Owner
This is the representative of the customer’s interests. The product owner is responsible for knowing the details of all the work that needs to be done. When a developer has a question about how something should work in the system the product owner is the one with the answer.
The big picture is maintained by the product owner, who will be there to remind everyone of the big picture as the project is being worked on. This role is vital to the development without a project. If you’ve ever worked on a project where the product owner was brought in at the beginning once and once at the end I am sure you know that things didn’t go well.
Knowing where the project is going and making sure it isn’t deviating from what is important cannot be stressed enough, and these are vital for the product owner.
Team Lead
Agile teams work very fluidly. During development, most team members are the same. The team lead has some extra responsibilities including: helping to resolve blocking and impeding issues, guiding stand ups, guiding retrospectives, guiding iteration planning sessions. I like the term “team lead”, because this person isn’t really the boss. This role is here to help guide the project and the progress. The leader is the person making sure that the agile process stays on the tracks.
The leader doesn’t make decisions. The leader helps keep everyone moving by clearing the path and making sure everyone sticks together.
Team Member
These are the people creating the application. The team lead is also one of these people. They will be breaking stories into tasks, estimating the size and difficulty of the stories, and working on the stories which create the application. If something needs to be fixed, created, or modified, these are the people who will be working on it.
Fluidity is the word to describe the development team. Each member of an agile team must wear multiple hats. The developers will be designing, developing, and testing the application throughout the process.
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