What are Agile Teams?

Agile team is the Project team that is assigned to an Agile project. A group of freelancers, employees or contractors would be responsible for executing the project. Agile teams are co-located and often confined to only one project rather than spreading across multiple projects parallelly.

An Agile team would need a team who are capable to deliver the end product.So,the team would be Cross-functional, and the roles may get interchanged depending on the project needs and the kind of Agile framework that is chosen.

Agile teams are formed based on the Framework the project has chosen. Let us see an example. When the team is using a Scrum framework, the team would need the Scrum Master, the product owner and other team members who are needed in a scrum team. The Scrum Master would be responsible for organizing the daily meetings, facilitating collaboration, and overseeing the project. He would also be responsible in making sure that the end product meets the customer requirements. Subject Matter Experts and other stakeholders may provide inputs for the project and when required. However, they are not considered as part of the Agile team.

In Agile Project Management, there are variety of Frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban, SAFe etc. Let us now discuss about the structure of each framework and roles involved in various Agile Frameworks.

Scrum

In a Scrum team, the team structure would involve specific Process and roles.The Scrum Process would break down a large project into small pieces which would be handled by the project teams one by one. A scrum team would usually have 5 to 6 members.Project Manager would become the scrum master and would handle the daily Scrum meetings in order to keep the team members on track.

Roles involved in a Scrum Team -

• The Product Owner
• The Scrum Master
• The Development teams

Kanban

Kanban is a neutral team structure which means that it can work with any team structure. So, creation of cross functional teams would be one of the first process improvements most organizations make to remove bottlenecks. A major benefit of using Kanban method is to reduce the cycle team between starting the work on a feature and getting feedback.

Roles of a Kanban team -

• Product owner
• Developer
• BA
• Tester
• Project Manager
• Development Team

Extreme Programming

Similar to the Scrum roles, XP also has a cross functional team which would work on stories and releases at the end of each iteration. Let us see the Roles involved in XP below:

The Whole team – XP Team is also a co-located, self-organized and cross-functional team which are similar to Scrum Team. It also performs ceremonies such as daily standup meetings, review meetings, retrospective meetings in each iteration. An XP team would consist of 5 to 20 members having different skills. XP does not allow working on different projects as context switching of developers would impact the work.

Roles in XP -

1. XP coach
2. On-site Customers
3. Programmer
4. Testers
5. XP Tracker
6. Sponsor