Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process (Shawn Kahl's Library) by Kenneth S. Rubin

Author:Kenneth S. Rubin [Rubin, Kenneth S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Published: 2013-02-25T08:00:00+00:00

Figure 12.3. Combined feature team and component teams

In this approach, the concept of a feature team has been reintroduced. There is now a single feature team that can pull an end-customer-valuable feature off of the product backlog. This feature team has complete responsibility for doing the work and managing the logistics of getting the feature done.

Trusted component teams also remain in this model to help maintain the integrity of the individual component areas. These component teams still have a product backlog that typically contains technically oriented work that needs to take place within the component area (perhaps technical debt repayment work).

Also, as illustrated in Figure 12.3, a member of a component team can be assigned to be a member of a feature team. This person has the dual responsibility of being both a pollinator and a harvester (Goldberg and Rubin 1995).

In the role of pollinator, the component team members pollinate feature teams with knowledge of the component areas to help better promote shared code ownership within the feature teams. In the role of harvester, component team members collect changes that the feature teams need to make within component areas and discuss those changes with their colleagues on the component teams, each of whom might also be collecting changes to the same component areas. In these discussions, the component team members can better ensure that the component-area changes needed to satisfy the requests of multiple feature teams can be coordinated. Additionally, the people making the component-area changes can do so in a coherent, nonconflicting fashion, thus better ensuring the conceptual integrity of the component areas. The component team members can also keep each other apprised of potential reuse opportunities because everyone has a shared understanding of the changes being harvested in the component areas.

Like the pure component team approach, this approach also can break at large scale—but for different reasons, ones that we can actually address. For example, when I introduced this approach to people at one large company, they remarked, “But our features can cut across up to 50 different systems [components]. We can’t move 50 people up to be on one feature team.” Although a feature may indeed cut across 50 components, it is rare that all 50 of the components need to directly interact with one another. As a result, we don’t need one team of 50 people, but instead we can create several “feature teams” that form around smaller clusters of components that do have a high degree of interaction (see Chapter 13, Figure 13.5 and Figure 13.6, for examples) and then coordinate the efforts of these teams with the multiple-team techniques that I will describe later in this chapter.

Another way the approach in Figure 12.3 can break is if the organization is working on 40 different products and has only four team members in a component area. It doesn’t make sense to assign people out to ten different feature teams at the same time. However, this problem can be solved by reducing the number of products

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