Development Team: Can PO & SM be a part of it?

Vaquas,

There's nothing specifically prohibiting it, but there may be some problems with attempting to do it that way.  Clear separation of duties is very important, as is delegation of tasks.

I'll give you a hypothetical that I've seen in other threads.  Let's say that you have a Scrum Master/Developer.  A problem pops up and they have to make a choice.  Do they act as a Scrum Master and facilitate the problem, at the same time failing to complete their sprint deliverables?  Or do they focus on the value-driven work, and let the problem fester?  Or, do they work 60 hour weeks to try to do it all?

If it were you, how would you best handle that situation?

Hi Jason!

Thanks for the reply.

As mentioned by you that SM being part of the development team may cause the conflicts of duties.

This very logic is strong enough to prohibit SM from being the part of development team.

Same can be inferred about PO.

As SG doesn't talk about it, want to know if you have come across any projects where these two have been part of development team? 

The most effective way I could see this is to schedule them into both roles in a non-overlapping way.  In other words, 20h/week Developer, 20h/week Product Owner or Scrum Master.  This makes the assumption that your project is simple and complexity-free enough to not require full-time work in either role.  This way the single developer can do both roles independently of each other without giving anything up; unfortunately, it also means you can't have a full-time Scrum Master.

A second option you do have is delegation.  The Scrum Guide explicitly mentions that so long as accountability is maintained, a PO can delegate backlog tasks to the development team.  The SM can also theoretically do this, because any developer could run a meeting, manage the Post-It retrospective tool, etc.  The SM role still needs to exist for the sake of accountability and monitoring, but actual operation of these tasks can be delegated.

As for personal experience, it seems as though dual roles usually works "well enough" because those conflicts of interest aren't incredibly common.  You can usually talk your developer into putting the 60 hours in once or twice.  But it's bad form, and you're creating your own form of project debt by not having both resources available simultaneously when needed.

I dont think 20 hours per week for scrum master and 20 for developer would work. ok lets say if that work for scrum master if they are too good. but I feel it would not be good for a PO. lets say if there is a time he needs to take a decision on a story, what will he be when he takes that decision? he has to be a PO and take a decision in the interest of the scrum team. if he was a developer when he took the decision( i meant some cushion for himself), it would go against scrum principles or be problem in achieving sprint goal.

The decision should be dependent on the composition of the team and the size of the project.

The following risk can be taken into consideration

a. The person could be interrupted with scum master duties at any time and probably need to stay away from getting involved in critical activities.

b. It can be difficult for team members to switch between scrum master or team member when they would like to discuss an issue.

c. When Scrum Master working as a team member will not be able to invest time shielding the team from outside distraction or  translating / verifying if those discussions are value addition.

That is true Ganesh, the person splitting the roles would need to be very effective at separating his duties and avoiding any conflict of interests.  In practice, people aren't nearly as good at that as we'd like them to be.  I also agree that's a bigger risk with a Developer/Product Owner than a Developer/Scrum Master, since those duties overlap and interact more closely with each other.

I'd also have to ask why you'd want to do this instead of hiring a dedicated SM and PO.  I imagine the most common reason would be departments seeking to save money on staffing costs, but Scrum offers several better alternatives to achieve that goal.

I did not read the entire comments section, but I can send back to J.Sutherland's book on Scrum, where he precisely mentions on several occasions that the SM must be part of the team, part of the process and shaper of it. 

He also says that PO and SM have distinct roles, respectively what and how to, how the PO can be responsible of the what and at the same time be under the supervision of the SM for the how to, although theorically possible, I see it very dangerous, just because of how it could potentially impact the what.

Why not? Scrum guide does not say it must be different person but it MUST BE A DIFFERENT ROLE.

The challenges will be whether the person holding multiple hats are able to make judgement which still holds the scrum values when the Scrum Team is facing difficult situation. He must be able to balance himself to make a sound decision. For example, when there is a new tool discovered by one of the team members needs to be integrated to make the system better, will the person (both a Development team members and Scrum Master) make the correct approach to highlight to PO and assess the current sprint velocity and sprint goals before doing it? Or he will be too excited to implement this new tool as a developer?

It is not prohibited in Scrum. But in my mind it depends on many factors. In majority cases I guess it is not a good practice especially for the Product Owner

Lyonel Scapino You may be confusing scrum team for development team.

scrum.org had a question about can someone can span multiple roles in a scrum team + when, and their answer was “no” (kind of a trick question). It came up on one of my exams. Thankfully I was prepared thanks to my training from Mike Cohn, where he explicitly called out this question. I wish I could find a source now to link.

The technical answer is no. The reason, PO and SM are roles, not jobs titles. If the person performing SM work contributes to dev team work, the have the hat of a dev team role (and in that period would not be in the SM role). You can only wear one hat at a time.

Another call out is splitting the role, say 50/50. I don’t see this as feasible. There will be times the team will need more than 50% of your time. Being a SM means being available to support the team potentially 100%-ish of the normal working hours. The need for the SM is not allocated into specific windows, so a 50% allocation tends to be good on paper but flawed in application. If you cannot deliver the other 50% as a dev, then you have become a risk to the sprint goal. The design of 50% means this will be a designed ongoing risk. 

 

A common alternative is supporting 2 teams as only a SM. Still not ideal, but at least you are not context role switching and capacity as SM shouldn’t hurt delivery. Still flawed.

I think it is best to understand why a dedicated SM is not possible in your concrete situation. I know how it works in the real world, but having a dual role person seems to become the default vs the exception.

I have read through this discussion thread. I appreciate the practical implications of SM/PO being a part of the development team. However, the scrum guide clearly states while discussing the development team size that "The Product Owner and Scrum Master roles are not included in this count unless they are also executing the work of the Sprint Backlog." Please refer -> https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide-2017.html#the-development-team 

This implies that the framework still leaves open the possibility of SM/PO being a part of the development team. Hence, the answer to the questions, in my view, would be a 'Yes'.

P.S. The 2020 guide has done away with development team.

I think that not every team setup is equal and there is not a general answer to that question. There are many scrum teams that have POs that can partly develop and that works pretty fine.

I mean there are multiple tasks that fall under the term "development" like code reviews, small bugfixes or architectural work that sometimes don't need that much time and can always be done if there is time left  besides the standard PO work that was already mentioned here. I understand that a PO has many special things to do but someone that is very experienced and has somehow an organizational talent can still provide very valuable development work and fill holes here and there so that the team can achieve the overall sprint goal.  This will also provide the possibility to understand the product better and not loose the technical connection to it what is generally very important if you talk to your customers. 

Moreover if all of the developers are experienced and don't need much guidance then this should also make the work of a PO or SM easier so that is very likely that they can spend time on other things.

Many of the best running teams that i know work like that. I never understand why there is always so much animosity against POs or PMs developing some minor stuff in a sprint...

POs or PMs that have never written one single line of code perhaps have some kind of fear that this could be the new normal? I personally think there will always be room for non-developers depending on the company and the team setup so there should be no restrictions on how someone wants to fill these roles.

Just i side note: I often see POs that more or less work as sales or marketing managers because they lost the technical knowledge about the product and can not provide concrete answers to questions from customers.