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copied!<p>The short answer is an emphatic <strong>NO</strong>! Scrum does <em>not</em> blur or depreciate the skills required for specialization. Scrum does not promote generalization.</p> <p>The long answer is that in Scrum, the most important thing is to get the work "Done". The team, as a team (as opposed to a collection of individual "stars") collaborate, as needed, in order to get the job done. Whatever it takes - however they want (Scrum is about self managing, self motivating teams, right?).</p> <p>What this means is that a scrum team may be composed of several specialists, who primarily do what they specialized in (DBA, Graphic Design, even technical writers). The team, as a whole, should have all of the skills required to fulfill the requirements. This is not the same as saying that each team <strong>member</strong> has to have all of the skills aforementioned.</p> <p>That being said, it is often desired - often by the members themselves - that members other than the specialists be at least <em>adequate</em> in skills different from their specialty. Another poster already mentioned Scott Ambler's "General Specialist". This helps the team when there's too much work of one kind, when the specialist is absent, and it helps the member when he really would like to gain experience outside his specialty.</p> <p>Given that the team is self organizing, if for some reason a specialist finds himself in the middle of the sprint, without any work to do in his specialty, the best way to deal with it, is to simply ask the specialist what he wants to do. Let the team decide. The specialist can decide to help in his other areas of <em>adequacy</em>, do a POC for the next sprint, "shore-up" the defenses by fixing some long forgotten technical debt, or shine the shoes of the members who <em>are</em> working. </p> <p>Yup. I don't know if this is <strong>the</strong> long answer. But it definitely was <strong>a</strong> long answer. :-)</p>

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