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Scrum: Surgical team

Mythical Man Month is a great book of essays and I was reading this blog that talks about how the surgical team is a little bit strange in the present day because most of these jobs are automated. I thought i'd break it down to how i've actually seen it work or envision it to work in a scrum team. Keep in mind, i feel these are more of "roles" than positions. Some people might fill multiple roles... generally i've seen most people do fill multiple roles on these types of cross functional teams.

  • The copilot (hopefully an equal in programming ability to the surgeon so they can trade off back and forth pair programming, but usually there is one who is more experienced and driven)
  • The administrator (Scrum master role : usually this is a QA guy for some reason, maybe because their knack for getting things done with no authority)
  • The editor (Sr Business analyst and Jr Business Analyst, or the customer team. )
  • Two secretaries (admin assistants who bring you food for late night deployments, arrange parties, keep supplies fresh and conference rooms available. Two seems ridiculous for 1 team though)
  • The program clerk (svn does most of this, but it's great to have a jr business analyst to document the tricky bits of the specification, if for not other reason than to make an instruction manual for someone who can't read test code)
  • The toolsmith (a build master or general hackery guy. "Mr Fix-it". I usually recognize this guy by his huge desire to 'get into things and rebuild them')
  • The tester (QA guy or the business owner)
  • The language lawyer (For example a DBA you run to for TSQL queries, or that guru c# developer in the cube next to you)

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