The best scrum teams are those with team members who are fungible, i.e., capable of mutual substitution. This is easier in some teams and organizations than others. In a perfect world, your scrum team would be made up of people who can analyse, map, model, code, test, etc. However, in most teams, especially those just getting started with scrum, you will have team members whose comfort level and/or ability to work outside their current role is low.
In a user story that has ETL, and/or … (ELT), there will be multiple steps to complete the story, such as:
- Initial analysis
- Test outcome preparation and creation
- Data model update
- Source-to-target mapping document update
- ETL/ELT changes
- Quality assurance for ETL/ELT
- Update related views and/or presentation layer
- Quality assurance for view changes and/or presentation layer
- Check completed work against user story acceptance criteria
- Validate the definition of done and ensure the user story moves through the sprint
- Update data dictionary
If the team is not comfortable stepping outside their traditional roles, the steps involved require multiple handoffs between team members. If the handoffs are not well coordinated, you could be one week into a two week sprint before the person who owns the second task picks it up to work on it and completion of the subsequent tasks is jeopardized. This is manageable with a bit of diligence in the sprint in the short term, and would benefit from team cross-training in the long-term. One short-term solution could be to assign a user story owner within the sprint team for stories with a lot of handoffs. This person’s responsibility being to make sure the user story handoffs are coordinated appropriately.
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