In the last article, I outlined the Large Feature Team pattern as a first alternative to the Ideal Team Structure (ITS) if your organization cannot make the immediate leap to the ITS when transitioning to agile solution delivery. In another article, I provided an overview of the concepts of feature teams and components teams. In this article, I will discuss the second alternative using a combination of feature teams and component teams.
Transforming to an agile software delivery model is filled with lots of challenges, especially when you are talking about solutions delivered in an organization of a large scale. In these large organizations, one of the most common practices to achieve perceived efficiency is to build an organization of specialists. Every specialist knows how to get their specific tasks done very efficiently. Additionally, large companies typically have very large and complex software architectures for their systems. Between the specialists and the complex architectures, the job of getting the entire solution delivered is actually very inefficient since it “takes a village” (often a very big village) to get anything delivered. The most intrusive inefficiency with these organizational models is that they are not designed with support for natural delivery flow.
