Team Members

And so the third role that we want to talk about is called developers or team members, oftentimes called. We use the term developers not just to sort of, you know, exclude people who don't develop software, but no, rather it's, it's more to be inclusive, in fact. So what do we mean by developers? Well, we mean anybody with any of the skills needed to, to design and test and build and test and deploy working things of value. We know that can include business analysts, software developers, testers, automated test engineers. That can include DevOps specialists and deployment specialists, release managers. Heck, it includes really the sort of universe of people needed to go from all things design, test, build, test and deploy. You'll notice I say test before build because I'm a huge fan of test first development, which will come cover later. But developers, the third role, again, it's not an exclusive thing. Like we get it, not everybody develops software. But from a scrum perspective, we just kind of remove the whole like, what's your job title thing. Well, I'm a business analyst, so I only write user stories. No, not so much. I'm a developer, so I don't, I don't test nonsense. Of course you test developers. Of course you test. If you're not, you should be, you need to be. I'm a tester, so I don't develop well. Really? Are you sure? Like, we need to, we need to be cross functional in our thinking. And that's a key takeaway here for team members. When we say developers, we're cross functional. Now, does that mean everybody needs to know everything at the team level? Of course not. You know, that's, that's too much to, for any one person to do. No, what we mean is that the team itself is cross functional. All of those skills live on that team and they're able to develop and deliver together. There are some key responsibilities that the developers have, including creating a plan for the Sprint. We call that the Sprint backlog. Instilling quality by adhering to a definition of done, adapting their plan each day towards the Sprint goal, and holding each other accountable as professionals. Now I worked for a large global nonprofit at one point and I was senior director of engineering there. And I had the opportunity to change people's job descriptions and job titles, in fact. And we, we actually did re title everybody as developer on the team level. We wanted to just remove any barrier of anything that would have to do with us not being able to deliver the thing of value as a development team. And so that's the third role. Developers and don't tell the other roles, but this is my favorite role.