Scrum Team is made of three roles: that of the Product Owner, the Development Team and the Development Team. The Development Team role is to bring the business idea from the Product Owner into a technical fruition.
Development Team is a self-organizing, self managing, cross-functional team of 3- 9 professionals. They are responsible for building the actual product increment and meeting the sprint goal. The success of Scrum is directly proportional to the success of the development team.
Scrum Development Team has many responsibilities during the sprint as mentioned below:
It is only possible to fulfill above responsibilities when a Scrum Development Team exhibits certain characteristics as mentioned below.
The Development teams are self managing so they do not have a manager. Team members are mutually accountable to each other. The traditional Development Managers from a waterfall set up may end up being subject matter experts who act as consultants to the Development Team.
As per the Scrum Guide, the ideal team size should be between 3-9 people. These numbers don’t include the Scrum Owner and the Product Owner
The logic for this range of 3 – 9 people is :A team of less than 3 people won’t be cross-functional and would have skill set constraints and a team of larger than 9 people becomes to large for the empirical process to be effective and also the communication channels become so dense that the communication effectiveness degrades.
Usually, the Scrum Teams have an optimal team size of 5 – 7 team members.
The ScrumMaster is responsible for the effectiveness of the Scrum Team, so they are embedded with the Development team to ensure that the team understands the Scrum Framework and get better in Self Organization, Self Management and in Cross training.