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Open scrum answer description ... have some doubts on an answer, can you explain it to me ?

Last post 03:44 am March 11, 2020 by Thierry Savard-Saucier
3 replies
12:55 am March 10, 2020

Hello everyone !



I'm a new Scrum Master, and I have a problem with understanding this answer ... Could some knowledgeable Scrum Master ease me through swallowing it ?

I can't seem to agree with it, and I fear I'll have a hard time if I start getting answers wrong because my gut feeling tells me it's wrong ...



Question :

Which three behaviors demonstrate that a team is NOT self-organizing and are NOT following the Scrum Guide?



This answer : 

The Development Team members are working within the boundaries of their functional description and nicely handing off work from analyst to developer to tester to integration.



The description given in the test is :

"Scrum Development Team members don’t have titles, and no sub-teams; such as, testing, architecture, or operations are recognized.  Accountability belongs with the Development Team as a whole, regardless of whether team members have specialized skills."



My Problem :

I fail to see how in a real life situation this proves a team isn't self organized and not following the Scrum Guide ...  It's not true a programmer will take a business case and produce an analysis while the BA design a new interface for clients, while the UX designer code a new function ...



I can agree why Scrum doesn't recognized titles in the Dev Team. But I feel it's saying Scrum doesn't recognized highly specialized and distinct jobs within a team ...  ( our Scrum teacher kept on saying Team are multi-disciplinarian , and this answer feels like saying it should not. ) ... should I tell my boss to fire our Business Analyst, QA, and DBA and get new developers instead :-p ?





Maybe the language barrier makes me miss the point ... Can you explain this one to me ?



 


07:43 pm March 10, 2020

It's simply this: "Handing off from analyst to developer to tester" is a waterfall process. Scrum is about cross-functional teams that work together to complete the increment. Sure there are team members that are primarily developers or testers, but there should not be a feeling of "oh I'm a tester so I will just wait around until development is done before I get involved." 


10:09 pm March 10, 2020

In lean and agile practice people will generally go to where the work is, instead of waiting for the work to come to them. Being cross skilled in just one other discipline can help enormously.

If a team self-organized into a workflow of prescriptive hand-offs, and if this delivered maximum value efficiently, then that might indicate the challenge was insufficiently complex or emergent to justify the use of Scrum.


11:33 pm March 10, 2020

Curtis Slough   Ian Mitchell  :  Ho ! I see. Those are good explanations, thanks a lot !  It also makes more sense when seen this way than the way I was understanding the description.

 

 


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