How does a Scrum Team decide which items to work on? | Thinking Agile

Key Takeaways

hi there everyone and welcome to thinking agile a place where we take real-world problems when trying to implement agile within the working environment we will then submit those to our professional scrum trainers who would then explain what methods they would suggest to use within that scenario you can submit your questions to agile adaptdev.com or you can go to our website and use our contact form we'll then try to notify you if your question has been answered [Music] so again another interesting one how does the scrum team decide who works on any given item so first and foremost here we've got to get the idea of collective ownership of all the work by the developers who are doing the work so we used to be called the development team right they collectively as a unit were responsible for all the work being delivered during the sprint right so we've got to remain that way that by moving to calling the developers from the development team cannot be a stepped in individualizing blame right so how do they then how does it then decide there's a sprint backlog people are working on items maybe it's the first piece to be pulled if it's the first piece to be pulled maybe it'll be because that person actually has some good subject matter expertise and what needs to be done right or that pair of people might have good subject matter expertise uh and what it takes to be done to deliver that item and then you might go down second one but you should not just go and open if there's four items on the sprint backlog of four people as developers or previously development team right to do that the way to do scrum is not to go individually each open an item right that's just four people working individually assessing what will it take to deliver an item how much of our team do we need to actually take to assess to take that on and then selecting that and this you know once they've created the order of the sprint backlog the development team should be doing part of the understanding some part of this coming out of sprint backlog sprint planning then to some degree they should cherry pick they should go from the top down if you can't do so if not move to the next item that you can deliver but remember you're delivering it collectively as collectively owned by the developers or the development team within the scrum team right so there is no passing off to individualization you should certainly not be pre-assigning which is quite common um and uh should not be individually blaming you at the end of the day the scrum the development team or the developers within the scrum team are responsible to deliver that work uh and if not at the earliest possible moment to have that discussion with the product owner as to why it can't be delivered right and if you start moving that didn't divide individualization and assign well that's their they were the ones meant to do that that's when you'll start losing that and you'll find they'll go back to the days of oh we didn't deliver that why well didn't they come and speak to you about it so so watch for that and don't pre-assign select as you're going but select as a team based on what you think it who do you think it takes from our team to deliver this okay thank you