11.01.09
Abolish Roles
A few weeks ago, I noticed a theme developing in my Twitter feed. I had some friends tweeting from the Simple Design and Testing conference in Pittsburgh, and another friend tweeting about this blog entry. At the same time, I was working on some XP course material and was reminded of Kent Beck’s words “…[taking] commonsense principals and practices to extreme levels.”
So in the spirit of eXtreme Programming, I propose what I believe to be an interesting thought experiment: if self-organizing teams are good, then we will always treat the team as a unit; never drawing attention to specific roles.
This is interesting because success or failure should be measured as a team. If a developer on the team does a great job, but no working software is delivered, the team failed: therefore, the developer failed. If a tester on the team does a great job of providing test coverage over one, small part of the overall work for an iteration but no Stories are completed, the team fails: therefore, the tester failed. If the Iteration Manager does a great job of removing roadblocks and insuring work is driven from a prioritized backlog, but the requirements are unclear and the Demo fails, the team fails: therefore, the Iteration Manager fails. In short, any individual team member’s success is completely dependent upon the success of the team.
This should lead to a team where the concept of roles is, at a minimum, blurred. The team does whatever is necessary to attain the stated goals: meaning, individuals on the team do whatever is necessary for the team to succeed. There is only one role: team member.
So why is this a thought experiment? When it comes to getting real work done, we need competency in certain skills. It would be difficult — even silly — for a company to list job postings seeking “Team Members” without any specific skill set. We still need experts. We still need people with the specific ability to turn ideas into code; to effectively facilitate a team; to expertly test a system. Those roles, and more, are crucial to making real progress on software development projects.
Being an individual is easy. Working effectively on a team is a worthy challenge. What are some ways you are encouraging your coworkers to become teammates: to put the interests of the team ahead of their own interests/concerns/agendas?
