Custom Software Development Blog by Syberry

Scrum is a popular buzzword in software development, but it’s also much more than that. It is a sophisticated methodology that can bring a development team a lot of value if used correctly. Today, we’ll discuss one of the many tricky questions involving the personnel roles used with this framework: can a project’s product owner also be its scrum master?

Let’s start with the definitions of each role. According to the Scrum Guide, “The product owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from work of the development team, while the scrum master is responsible for promoting and supporting scrum as defined in the scrum guide.”

You may have heard the term “cross-functional” team used in discussing software development. This refers to a team on which members have different skill sets, which they each leverage toward a common goal: in this case, the development of a custom software application. Experience has shown that this is the best team-building approach, in terms of the ability both to adjust quickly and to optimize the development process and cost savings. What roles does a cross-functional team consist of? The idea of a cross-functional team originates in the context of the Scrum framework.

When a client hires a contract software development company to design and build custom software, the business is making a strong strategic choice to let the experts take over the heavy lifting of application development, but that doesn’t mean the client is off the hook altogether. The client’s input and participation are a crucial part of the process. After all, without direction from the client, the developers don’t know what to build. Each hour the engineers spend building must be in service of developing the software according to the client’s wishes, so the client’s team must be able and willing to make.

Potential customers often want to know if our custom software development firm possesses specific, relevant experience in their business domain. This is a great question — if a vendor has experience with similar projects to yours, that’s a good sign they’re a good fit. But the answer to this question isn’t the end-all, be-all, either. Of course, having relevant experience with similar applications in the same industry is a sign of an organization’s maturity. But the success of any given project — no matter what domain it’s in — depends less on expertise in that industry or business and more on the developer’s software development skill.

Contracting with third-party vendors to support any business processes — from marketing to finance to leadership consulting — requires sharing some amount of confidential information with outsiders. The nature and quantity of that information varies depending on the vendor’s role, but it’s especially significant for companies working with custom software developers to create new systems that will help run and grow the business. The software vendors will need access to information about business processes, the intellectual property underpinning existing systems, product roadmaps, and perhaps even customer and financial data, for starters.