Succeeding with Agile

Embrace Whole-Team Responsibility

One of the first steps to becoming a functional Scrum team is to come to terms with whole-team responsibility. When I teach, my favorite questions are the ones starting with “Who is responsible for....” It doesn’t matter how someone ends that question, my answer is always the same: the team.

Not wanting to fully evade such questions, I will expand further. Suppose the question was, “Who is responsible for the product backlog?” I will answer that although the whole team is responsible, it is the product owner I’ll go talk to about making it happen. The whole team should feel responsible for all aspects of the product. Quality is a whole-team responsibility. Clean code is a whole-team responsibility. Having a ...