What are Agile Team Roles?

There are several agile team roles and each one of them play a critical piece on the team.  There are various flavors in terms of the names but there are three basic roles on the agile team.  The agile team roles include: Agile Developer, Agile Tester and Agile Business Analyst.  These three agile team roles do the heavy lifting of the agile team.  Here are the responsibilities of those three team members:

Agile Developer:  The agile developer does the programming on the team.  The developer writes the code based upon the needs to the product team.  They take the requirement specifications and build the product.  The agile developer needs to be extremely talented.  They need to have a strong desire to constantly desire to learn new technology and want to build high quality software.  The role also might require the agile developer to jump in and perform testing or perform the role of the agile business analyst.

Agile Tester: The agile tester performs the testing on the team.  The agile tester needs to have strong analytical skills and be able to perform functional testing.  In addition, the agile tester needs to be extremely technically savvy.  Although I highly recommend that most agile teams have a separate QA Engineer role that perform automation and performance testing, in certain organizations the agile tester will need to develop automation scripts and develop performance test scripts.  The agile tester has to think like the end customer and find software defects.  There might be situations where the agile tester performs the role agile business analyst.

Agile Business Analyst:  The agile business analyst creates the documentation on the team and helps to ensure the team is collaborating and communicating efficiently.  This role is the glue that helps to keep the team together. The agile business analyst understands the product and helps to determine the needs of the business.

In addition to these roles, there are some additional roles that help complement the agile team.  Here are some additional roles which need to be incorporated:

Role of an Agile Coach

Role of Agile QA Manager

Role of Agile Development Manager