Which is a supporting role on a Disciplined Agile (DA) team?

Disciplined Agile (DA) categorizes team roles into two types: primary and supporting. Primary roles are essential for the team's day-to-day function throughout the initiative. Supporting roles, however, are engaged on an as-needed, often temporary, basis to provide specific skills or expertise that the core team lacks. A Specialist, such as a security expert or database administrator, is a classic example of a supporting role, brought in to address particular challenges or tasks before disengaging.

A. Team Lead: This is a primary role, responsible for facilitating the team, removing impediments, and ensuring the DA process is followed.
B. Architecture Owner: This is a primary role that owns the architecture decisions and guides the team on technical and design strategies.
C. Stakeholder: This is a primary role representing the individuals for whom the solution is being built and who will be affected by it.

1. Ambler, S. & Lines, M. (2019). Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working. Project Management Institute.

Page 38, Table 3.1 "The Roles on a Disciplined Agile Team": This table explicitly lists "Specialist" under the "Supporting Roles" category. It lists "Team Lead," "Architecture Owner," and "Stakeholder" under the "Primary Roles" category.

Page 47, Section "Supporting Roles": This section details the nature of supporting roles, stating, "The supporting roles are played on a temporary, as-needed basis... A specialist is someone with a specific skillset that is required by the team for a short period of time."