Thursday, July 14, 2011

development leads in scrum !?

Just assume that we decided to became agile and managing our development process in accordance to scrum. So we gonna have some product owner (PO), scrum master. Beside the development team we also have software architects involved in the product development.

The scrum master must help the team to improve, to be more affective. He tries to identify and to remove impediments, arguing with the PO, keeps the management off the team (if its necessary to do so), and so forth.

Anyway, I wondering whether we need an extra role have introduced to scrum: development lead.
Or may be the scrum master is a kind of development lead?

In the referred page its well defined that "The development lead is the mid-point in the path between being a developer and being the solutions architect." 
and further 
"The development lead is responsible for fleshing out any of the details in the architecture that the Software Architect didn't spell out in detail and for the creation of program specifications from which the developers work."

I thought, as naive as I am, that in a scrum team the team is mixed up, with some senior developers some newbies some field experts, and discuss intensive on User Stories during the planning and the development, under the instruction of the scrum master (who should/could(?) also help the team to understand the architectural aspects resp. constraints). On particular questions the architect(s) should be available. 

What is a development lead good for in such a process/ organization? May be we could just kick the scrum master and establish a development lead instead. Are we then still agile?

Further in the article: "The development lead spends a great deal of time managing the development process." But if we claim using scrum, is this not the role for a scrum master?

The last question for now: is it actually a matter how we label a particular role in the development team? Makes it our development process/SCRUM better or worse if we don't have scrum master(s), but development lead(s)?

Who cares!?

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