A “team” in the Agile sense is a small group of people, assigned to the same project or effort, nearly all of them on a full-time basis. A team (or “Scrum development team”) is optimally comprised of seven plus or minus two people and responsible for committing to work, delivering and driving the product forward from a tactical perspective.
For software development projects, the team members are usually a mix of software engineers, architects, programmers, analysts, QA experts, testers, UI designers, etc. This is often called “cross-functional project teams”. Agile practices also encourage cross-functional team members.
During a sprint, the team self-organizes to meet the sprint goals. The team has autonomy to choose how to best meet the goals, and is held responsible for them. The ScrumMaster acts as a guardian to ensure that the team is insulated from the product owner. Scrum also advocates putting the entire team in one team room.
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