The Scrum Guide 2011... snap!

During a 30 minute spike today on UI blocks, the discussion wound around to...

Couldn't the "developers" implement some of the BDD steps?

Well the "testers" do that.

Oh... Well we're accruing quite a bit of debt from the rough UI we have at the moment. Couldn't the "developers" work on the UI/UX?

Well the "business analysts" and "UI experts" do that. 

It seems very, very odd when you think about it. It also seems to run counter to some pretty basic scrum principals. I was going to let it slide, but then I saw there's been an update to The Scrum Guide (2011).There have been a few refinements made to the document, they are listed in the summary page. Have a read, it's very easy to follow. There's a few gem's on page 6 (some paragraphs removed)...

The Development Team
Development Teams are structured and empowered by the organization to organize and manage their own work. The resulting synergy optimizes the Development Team’s overall efficiency and effectiveness. Development Teams have the following characteristics:

• They are self-organizing. No one (not even the Scrum Master) tells the Development Team how to turn Product Backlog into Increments of potentially releasable functionality; 
• Development Teams are cross-functional, with all of the skills as a team necessary to create a product Increment; 
• Scrum recognizes no titles for Development Team members other than Developer. Regardless of the work being performed by the person, there are no exceptions to this rule;
• Individual Development Team members may have specialized skills and areas of focus, but accountability belongs to the Development Team as a whole; and,
• Development Teams do not contain sub-teams dedicated to particular domains like testing or business analysis.

At the risk of getting all high and mighty, shouting "you're doing it all wrong!" or "the book says you're not allowed to do that!"; which obviously achieves nothing, and irritates a lot. I've been trying the gentler "as part of improvements for next sprint, what could we do to become a more cross functional team?" approach in our sprint retro.

We shall see...