Collaboration/Team/Roles and responsibilities

Product owner[edit]

The product owner, in a nutshell, is ultimately responsible for the product or service to be delivered. The product owner is responsible for:

Providing vision for the product or service being developed
Being the single point of escalation for contending priorities among stakeholders
Managing the product road map
Making final decisions about trade-offs when desired functionality, or scope, exceeds the capacity of the team
Defining the target constituent for iterations, releases, and the overall product
Making final decision about whether or not work done on stories is complete ('acceptance').
Doing the work of determining what features the team should work on in order to achieve our user, community, and Foundation goals. This is done in collaboration with the team
Making sure that our products have a coherent, compelling user experience

Because the product owner has the final say over prioritization, there should be only one person acting as product owner.

Scrummaster[edit]

The scrummaster is primarily responsible for maintaining the team's process and ensuring the team delivers what is expected from the product owner. Responsibilities include:

Evolving team/agile capacity
Removing blockers
Leading/coordinating/facilitating whole team in story delivery
Facilitating meetings
Optimizing process
Coordinating project work streams
Helping to manage project/iteration scope
Managing external dependencies
Escalating risks/issues
Reporting on progress

Tech lead[edit]

The tech lead guides and represents the engineering team. Responsibilities include:

Assisting in planning activities and representing the engineering team at planning meetings when the rest of the team is not present
Owning the maintenance of the quality and architectural coherence of the code developed by the project
Escalating significant architectural/technical issues for prompt resolution
Coordinating regular refactoring/code hygiene to prevent accumulation of technical debt
Communicating, educating, and enforcing best practices and standards
On-boarding of new team members
Bugzilla
- Provide leadership to ensure tasks are triaged properly, become actionable and move forward
- Be responsible for ensuring that appropriate tasks get WONTFIXED when there are technical problems
Responsible for ensuring that the team has a presence in important conversations on wikitech-l and EE mailing lists

Quality Assurance analyst (QA)[edit]

QA oversees the quality of the product. Responsibilities include:

Producing test cases/scenarios
Manual testing when not automated/automatable
Maintaining regression test suite
Integration testing
Exploratory testing
Assisting in acceptance criteria definition
Training and otherwise working with engineers in best-practices for assuring code and product quality

Engineer[edit]

Engineers build the product and coordinate the construction of supporting infrastructure. Responsibilities include:

Turning user stories/requirements into working software
Conducting the technical analysis of requirements
Assisting in the evolution of user experience designs
Coordinating the implementation of supporting architecture/infrastructure
Assisting with testing
Estimating user stories
Working with QA to automate testing scenarios
Presenting work to QA and BA for final testing
Escalating risks and issues that impact scope and timeline
Writing code in line with project standards
Standing behind architectural decisions, patterns and best practices that the team has agreed to

User Experience (UX) designer[edit]

The UX Designer defines how users will interact with the product. Responsibilities include:

Research & gathering data to assess needs/requirements of users
Proposing designs to define how users will interact with the functionality of the product (including designs of UX in general, and the product's interface in particular)
Providing solutions to business and user problems or opportunities
Providing design expertise and guidance to engineers and QA during code writing and testing
Ensuring that the product is not only useful, but usable and desirable as well
Assisting in narrative and user story development, particularly in the delivery of development-ready design assets and/or prototypes
Leading usability testing and logging associated findings

Business analyst[edit]

The business analyst is responsible for ensuring that the team has as much information about end-users as possible to help in prioritization and product decisions. Responsibilities include:

Gathering data on features and user behavior to assist in user story creation and analysis
Summarizing and communicating the needs of existing users to the team
Identifying dependencies/related stories or gaps in sprints/releases
Helping test stories for completion
Performing quantitative and/or qualitative analysis to measure the impact and success of features on the editing community
Providing deep community insight at every stage of product development

Community liaison[edit]

The Community liaison assists in maintaining a line of communication between the Wikipedia community and the team. Responsibilities include:

Disseminating information about new features to the community
Gathering feedback on new releases and features requests for future releases from end-users
Shaping discussions with the community around wider rollouts
Assisting the product owner in prioritizing feedback and features requests
Performing quantitative and/or qualitative analysis to measure the impact and success of features on the editing community
Providing deep community insight at every stage of product development