Team members are responsible for collaborating with all roles to decide precisely what to build and are accountable for delivering on their commitments to the backlog owner.
The stacked plates visualization of the backlog implies that the team is just a consumer of ready work, with minimal responsibilities during backlog refinement. In the Rock Crusher model, the team (we prefer this term to developers) is an active participant in backlog refinement. This goes straight back to the Agile Manifesto value statement regarding “customer collaboration over contract negotiations.” The team actively and purposely collaborates with other Rock Crusher roles to decide precisely what to build.
Although roles such as the solution owner and backlog owner are accountable for deciding precisely what to build, they are not dictatorial gatekeeper roles. Team members contribute their knowledge to refinement. The Rock Crusher village gains two significant advantages from this collaborative refinement process:
- They can make better refinement decisions because they are drawing on multiple sources of knowledge from multiple points of view.
- The team becomes so knowledgeable about the rocks they are refining that they can make believable delivery commitments to the backlog owner.
To learn more about the role of the team and the economic consequences of a team that is coding-centric and disconnected from the value stream, refer to The Rock Crusher chapters
- chapter 3 The Rock Crusher Roles and Responsibilities,
- chapter 8 Backlog Refinement with the Rock Crusher