Markus Gaertner

This is a story from a colleague who was providing technical coaching for a client. He was one of the technical coaches working with 40 Scrum Teams to improve on their technical and development practices and bring them on par with 21st-century standards.

At one of these sessions, the technical coaches provided training, mentoring, and coaching about modern development concepts like test-driven development (TDD) and acceptance-level TDD (ATDD). One of the developers involved went to his desk, opened his drawer, pulled out his working contract, pointed at it, and said: “It does not say ‘testing’ in here.”

Clearly, that developer was relying heavily on his paper contract. If it didn’t state to wash his hands after he went to the toilet, maybe he wouldn’t have done so either. Who knows?

But seriously. Does it help if an idle team member points out that something is not their job while the work needs to get done and all the other people involved are too busy to do it? Not really.

Taking a closer look at companies large and small, we see a particular pattern. In smaller companies, it seems to be more accepted behavior to take over work even though it may not be part of your job description or not even your expertise. In larger companies, though, people are more hesitant to do so, as the likelihood of stepping on someone else’s toes is higher and might cause problems, not to mention that it often doesn’t help them advance their career.

Regardless, I don’t think the latter attitude is helpful to solve the complex problems for which we introduce the use of Scrum.

As humans, we are born with few fully developed skills. One of the core things the human brain is capable of is learning new things, which it does continuously for its whole life. We learn to crawl, to stand up, and eventually to walk and run. Each next step of our path of continuous learning frees us from the perceived problems we experienced in every previous phase.

Just because something is not your job, it should not keep you from acquiring the skills to perform that work if it has to be done. And if that work really does not have to be done, then everybody will probably agree to not do it. That is very different from saying, “That’s not my job!”

We learn to improve all our lives long. That’s what distinguishes humans from other species. Use that capability that makes you human to contribute to your team’s efforts while also developing yourself.

“That’s not my job” really is a pretty cheap excuse for not doing the related work. Don’t go there, because it undermines team morale and your self-development.