Developer
Characteristics
- It is a cross-functional team: all members work together in solidarity, with shared responsibility for the increment. If the team fails, the team fails; if it succeeds, the success belongs to the team.
- There may be members who specialize in specific areas, but responsibility for the increment lies with the team as a whole, not with individuals.
- There is no fixed rule for the size of a Scrum team. Including the Product Owner, the Scrum Master, and the developers, a team of three or four people—or even a larger one—can be appropriate, up to a maximum of ten. Beyond this, maintaining direct communication becomes difficult, and friction within group dynamics tends to increase.
- Teams working with AI tend to be smaller, as each individual can cover a greater scope of work; while a small team coordinates more effectively, it also offers less diversity of perspectives. The appropriate size is a context-dependent decision, within that maximum limit.
Working group vs. team
The difference between a working group and a team is central to Scrum:
- In a working group, people have specific assignments of individual responsibility and follow execution guidelines. Each person is individually accountable, even if they work in the same organization.
- A team has a collaborative spirit and a common purpose: to deliver the greatest possible value for the customer's vision. Developers self-manage, coordinate without a manager who assigns and monitors the work, take part in decision-making, and share the Sprint Goal and responsibility for achieving it.
Developers in AI-enabled teams
With AI, the value of a developer’s work shifts, in part, from execution to specifying, orchestrating, and reviewing: knowing what to ask of the AI—and with what context—as well as how to evaluate its output, when to reject it, and how to integrate it. This does not render technical expertise unnecessary; in fact, evaluating work produced by AI requires greater judgment than producing it oneself.
Reviewing AI-generated output is work: review and integration tasks are added to the sprint backlog and planned just like any other task, and the definition of done requires that all work produced by AI be reviewed by a human.
Some organizations refer to this profile as a "product builder," and some teams, when estimating, distinguish between AI-driven work, human work, and review and integration work (three-level estimation). These are emerging practices and terms, not part of the standard framework.
Common mistake
Treating "developer" as a synonym for "programmer." In multidisciplinary teams that build digital products, the role of "developer" can encompass UX designers, technical writers, data analysts, and QA or accessibility specialists. Limiting the definition to a programming-focused profile is one of the reasons why certain disciplines end up excluded from the Scrum team, continuing to operate as separate departments—thereby undermining the cross-functionality that makes a team effective.
Resources
📄 Scrum Master v.4.0Free download · Scrum Manager
📊 Scrum Master 5.0Free download · Scrum Manager
See also
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