Scrum Team

The self-organizing Scrum Team is a heart of Scrum. This are the members of the team who build the product that is going to be delivered to the customer. There are two main features that distinguish Scrum Teams from traditionally managed teams. The Scrum Team is cross-functional, which means it is fully capable of delivering the potentially shippable product to the customer every Sprint. The team is also self-organizing, with a lot of autonomy and accountability.
The perfect Scrum team can be described as collaborative, trusting, committed, creative, innovative, responsible, reliable, business-value oriented, multi-skilled, constructive in their criticism and making decision as a team.

Scrum team members

A typical Scrum team usually consists of seven plus or minus two members. The Scrum Team in Scrum terminology are known as ‘Pigs’, whilst everyone else are known as ‘Chickens‘.
A team selects or is assigned to the goal for a sprint at a sprint planning meeting and has to specify work results. At the sprint planning meeting the team also appoints their Scrum Master, who technically belongs to the team but is not a part of development team. The roles of the members of the team does not have to be specified and members can share some duties, or more than one person can deal with one task.

In software development companies Scrum teams do not include any of the traditional software engineering roles such as software architect programmer, designer or tester. Everyone works on on the project together to achieve the collective goals they have committed to complete within a current sprint.
To succeed the Scrum team has to develop a team spirit and a feeling that everyone is evenly responsible for the project. All the members have to be equally involved and have to be aware that they have to do the work themselves and no tasks can be delegated to someone else. There are also no limitations of the actions allowed and the team has the right to do everything within the boundaries of the project guidelines to reach the Sprint goal.

Sometimes it can take time to form a Scrum team to form and start its performance, and some teams require more support than others. Although Scrum Teams are self-managing they usually have to be taught the teamwork by a Scrum Master, who leads the team through the process but gives no ready answers.
With a good Scrum Master a team learns quickly how to solve problems independently and deconsturct the backlog to plan and organize their work schedule. This is very important to avoid waterfall managing habits but to teach the members of the team how to develop good self-managing skills.

Types of Scrum teams

Some of the Scrum experts distinguish three types of Scrum teams in Scrum adoption process.

  • The first type, Enterprise Transition team, is a single Scrum team responsible for managing the adoption that consists of senior management of a company.
  • The second type of Scrum team, Scrum rollout team, is responsible for doing the adoption work and causing the enterprise to change.
  • The last type of Scrum team builds products for the enterprise using Scrum.

They are called Scrum development teams and are in fact the teams descried above.