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PODoes the Scrum process ultimately divest team members from their respective skills?
 

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    <p>My organization has been experimenting with the introduction of more "Agile" methods. We've been trying the Scrum approach for a short while, and most of the team has, more or less, adapted to it. I like it as a whole, but I'm concerned about one potentially severe impact of the methodology: as teams are consistently focused on features and backlog items, and testers are more integrated with the overall development process, it seems like skill sets are becoming blurred, and people are sensing less respect for their individual abilities.</p> <p>Some of our developers are excellent at server-side technologies and optimization of heavy-weight data provisioning. Others have invested a large amount of their careers learning GUI technologies and have developed a fundamental understanding of users and usability in an application. Neither skill set is better than the other, but they are certainly different.</p> <p>Is this an inevitable result of the Scrum process? Since everyone on the team (as I understand it) contributes to satisfying the next feature/requirement, backlog item, or testing goal at hand, the underlying philosophy seems to be "anyone can do it." This is, in my experience, simply not true. Most engineers (developers, testers, etc.) have a particular skill set they have honed over the years, and the Scrum methodology, in my mind, tends to devalue those very abilities they were previously respected for.</p> <p>Here's an example for clarification:</p> <p>If a sudden change of technology occurs on the server-side data provisioning, and every item on the to-do list for the sprint is based on this new change, the GUI developers (who likely haven't had time to become acclimated with the new technology) might not be able to contribute to the sprint. At the very least, they will need to invest time to get ramped up, and then their code will be suspect because of their lack of experience.</p> <p>I understand the need for rapid development to discourage "role silos" but doesn't this discount one fundamental reality: people develop <em>skills</em> in accordance to necessity, their interests, or their experiences. People seem to be less motivated when they perceive their position is one of "plug-ability" (e.g. we can "plug" anyone in to do this particular task). How does Scrum address this? If it doesn't, has anyone addressed this when adopting the Scrum methodology?</p>
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    1. CO+1 for a very insightful analysis. I wish my first scrum master would have understood that developers aren't just developers but experts in specific areas and that it is not bad thing but a good thing.
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    2. COI think that some people might view it as a bad thing, at least in situations where you only have one or two people who are experts on a certain something and the company is screwed if those people ever leave.
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    3. COI don't think either view on specialization (good or bad) is valid or invalid, but just different viewpoints that you can have - it's a tradeoff like just about everything else. Although in the Agile world, some might say that having a more well-rounded team makes the org more agile as a whole.
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