Roles in Agile

What are the common roles on an agile team? Agile developer, agile tech lead, agile delivery lead, QA? Many of you will recognize these titles, many have filled one or more of them.

Team roles are something that are prescribed by some methodologies and sometimes they evolve on the team. Other times they are simply appointed because it feels natural to have them.

Over the years I have filled a few of these and in most instances the roles imply a set of responsibilities that differentiate them. I have thought about these roles when I have been in them and wondered lately why they have to exist.

The current client I am engaged with is in the midst of an agile transformation and the teams that have been created have been structured as Scrum teams with all of these roles accounted for. The teams have various levels of success with the transformation, mostly pretty good.

What I have come to realize is that the roles are an illusion.

There isn't any one particular role that one team member holds that can't be distributed across the team as stories. Admittedly, different team members have different skills and abilities that influence the level of success that each member would have taking on these stories. However, these differences should be mitigated with solid pairing and mentoring and would, over time, develop all of the team players to take on the tasks normally assigned to a role without requiring a particular person executing them exclusively.

The structure of the teams have been configured as they are to impose structure to allow a level of comfort to the players involved as they became knowledgeable in the discipline of being agile. The intent is that the structure will be stripped away in time while leaving the responsibilities with the team.

Whether that means the roles remain with the same people filling them is an open question. I believe that the roles themselves can melt away or effectively become hats that different team members wear on any given day.

Personally I prefer the latter option. I think the team as a whole will be more nimble and be able to adapt to change much better than if the names remain the same. If all team members have handled the responsibilties over time, with a self-organizing, revolving door, then the loss of one member due to illness, outside change or simple evolution, the team ownership of the product and process is stronger and the commitment is stronger. I also believe the quality of every person on the team will be higher than would otherwise be the case. All of this means the product is better, the team is better and consequently the organization is better.

What do you think?