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Career Plan in a Scrum Team

Last post 06:43 am May 23, 2017 by Julian Bayer
2 replies
Augusto Colombelli Alessio
02:12 pm May 22, 2017

I would like opinions.

With Scrum, we have 3 roles in the team, Scrum Master, Product Owner and Dev. We have no more specialists and project manager. How is career plan in your company?

For example:

Some people are more concerned with improving their skills. These people receive a better salary. How do we differentiate a senior devteam from a junior devteam?

Thanks

Jason Jafarian
03:09 am May 23, 2017

What agile benefits do you see in generalizing nearly everyone as a "developer" when it comes to career tracks?  What are you giving up by eliminating specializations?

I'm a big supporter of cross-functional training, and at the same time, I'm not fond of eliminating job specializations.  On paper, every developer should be able to do every development task in a Scrum Team.  In practice, someone with experience and a background in a specific set of tasks will do them better than a cross-trained novice.  In the spirit of high-functioning teams, my personal opinion is that specializations help development teams self-organize and distribute their tasks more effectively.

Julian Bayer
06:43 am May 23, 2017

I'm with Jason. In fact, specialists are good for the team. They can bring their expertise and pass it on when pairing with other developers. Plus, different developers have different interests. If one of the developers is interested in becoming a better tester and one is interested in becoming a software architect, why shouldn't I send them to training?

Of course, in a Scrum Team, their role will not be "tester" or "architect". But they may become their team's foremost experts in those areas and that is a form of career advancement, even if it doesn't come with a softer chair and new business cards.

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