Agile2013

Using agile with one team and one product backlog is straightforward. But, how do we scale to support larger products/projects that involve more people than can reasonably fit on a single team? Most agile practitioners recommend scaling with feature teams--cross-functional and cross-component teams that can pull end-customer features from the product backlog and complete them. Most large organizations prefer scaling with component teams--teams that focus on the development of a component or subsystem that can be used to create only part of an end-customer feature. Given the diversity of organizations and the work that they do, it would be naive to assume that one type of team is always superior to another in all situations. In this session I describe and then apply an economic framework for making informed tradeoffs when considering whether to scale with component teams, feature teams, or a blended model. By considering the economic consequences of our choices, we can address multi-team waste and better achieve the fast, flexible flow of features while maintaining the integrity of core components.