The different meaning of stakeholders in Scrum. Is the development team an interested party?

Question

As a rule, I found out that interested parties (in general) are interested in the project - the development team, testing group, QA team, management, client (of course), etc. But now Scrum says that the stakeholders are those who test the product, and the product is made for them based on their needs. This implies that this only means the customer. Is this right, or did I misunderstand, is the development team really a stakeholder?

http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/21-contracts-for-implementing-scrum

Stakeholders are those interested in the Scrum developed and / or process. These may include suppliers , customers, business owner, subject matter expert, or product support .

http://thescrumblog.blogspot.cz/2011/04/stakeholders-and-feedback-in-scrum.html

The Scrum Team: A lot of people forget that the Scrum team is a major stakeholder for the project 

Answer 1

Well,

The Tecnically Scrum Development team is part of the stakeholders : for example, the product owner or the guy (s) who pay (s) for the project. [boss, investors, etc.]

But the real criteria for defining StakeHolder are : [with the danger of oversimplifying "happy" and "sad" terms]

If the project has not succeeded, who will be "sick"? Or if the project is succedded, who will be “happy”?

Thus, even end users are interested parties. :-)

And if investors really don't like the success of the project [can such investors exist? well, people are irrational, and yes, they can exist because of some kind of policy], they are simply "stakeholders" on paper not in reality.

Answer 2

Frankly, I think you were misunderstood because you used several Scrum roles in your definition of “stakeholder.”

The classic definition of stakeholders is that they are people with legitimate interests in the project. Stakeholders are NOT always product owners, and should not be confused with the role of product owners in Scrum.

The owner of the product helps to determine the backlog of the scrum team, sets the priorities for the units of work and reports the progress to the "stockholders". These units of work are first “checked” with the Product Owner, and usually again at the demo end of the sprint, iterations are completed by “interested parties”.

Clients or users are who you build the software for. They can also be considered “stakeholders”, but I would not do that. I personally like to draw a clear line between the stakeholders of the project "support / sales / business leaders / etc" and "customers / users".

If you just got into Scrum, I would highly recommend the following book:

• http://www.amazon.ca/User-Stories-Applied-Software-Development/dp/0321205685

Answer 3

The ultimate Scrum tutorial is a Scrum tutorial. It does not identify stakeholders, although it uses the term “stakeholders” 4 times in a document.

Scrum Tutorial - http://www.scrum.org/Portals/0/Documents/Scrum%20Guides/Scrum_Guide.pdf

In general, however, the interested party is anyone who is interested in the project. This may include investors / board, management, end users, developers, and anyone who either finances, uses, or creates a product.