Role of the customer in scrum management [closed]

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I'm revising for my Software Engineering exam, and one of the usual questions is the role of various people in the project. I feel confident enough about how to answer the role of the product owner, scrum master and team, but I'm not sure about the customer.

I know they liaise with the product owner and write the user stories for them ideally. After the estimation is carried out, the customer then prioritises them. The customer can at anytime change the priorities on the product backlog, but can't touch anything once it hits the sprint backlog. At the end of the project, they have the product demonstrated to them in the sprint review and can make constructive comments, etc. They also can attend the sprint retrospective. Additionally, they can act as a chicken at any scrum meeting.

Is there anything else I'm missing?

Answer 1

Can you talk a bit by exactly what you mean by "customer" here. For example:

• In XP for example "Customer" is a role that's pretty much synonymous with Product Owner in Scrum
• Customer is sometimes used as a synonym for the end-user of the product. So if I'm building an ecommerce system the people buying products would be the customers.
• Customer is sometimes used as a synonym for "client" - so the person who asked you to build the ecommerce system would be the customer.
• Ditto for stakeholder. Ditto for the person paying for the system.

So - which customer will affect the answer considerably ;-)

Customer isn't a Scrum role. It's not a Scrum concept. The PO is the person who owns the responsibility for the product backlog. To quote from the Scrum Guide:

The Product Owner is the sole person responsible for managing the Product Backlog. [...] The Product Owner is one person, not a committee. The Product Owner may represent the desires of a committee in the Product Backlog, but those wanting to change a backlog item’s priority must convince the Product Owner.

Answer 2

The customer may well also be the product owner, or you have a product owner who acts as a proxy for the customer, or customers.

Answer 3

You have most of the customer's responsibilities covered. I would say they can not change anything to stories that are being worked on in the current sprint. Otherwise there are options available to accommodate for this change.

Once they provide comments they get added as additional tasks into the user story and moved into the next sprint.

Answer 4

As adrianh said, the customer is not a role of Scrum. If the customer plays the role of the PO, call him PO, no customer. The PO could be the customer, but it must do all the PO duties. Remember that the PO is part of the Team.

The customer is part of the stakeholders group. The team (the PO included) make a informal demo (or similar) on the sprint review to the stakeholders to get feedback for the sprint goal accomplished.