Hello Jan.
IMO you should build a cross-functional team by all means. "To help each
other" not just means doing pair programming sessions. It also means to
** help each other spot problems (front-end devs are users of the
back-end and can/should provide valuable feedback, back-end devs
can advise front-enders as to how to best use the API),
** make sure that business value is delivered (neither FE nor BE devs
can do that alone because there is no such thing as FE user stories
or BE user stories),
** be more than just a group of people but more than the sum of its
constituents (this is called a team),
** stop thinking of "us" vs. "them"
** and many more things I am quite sure you already know or at least
heard of.
The list could go on and on.
My feeling is that you already have a bias towards splitting the team
(or keeping it split, whatever the current situation is) and are looking
for justification. If you want to split the team, split it, you do not
need my blessing and are not going to get it. ;-)
Best regards
--
Alexander Kriegisch
https://scrum-master.de
Jan Michelfeit [email protected] [extremeprogramming] schrieb am 12.02.2017 18:21:
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> I would like to know your opinion on a team setup for three frontend/UX developers and a bunch of backend developers - whether putting them together in a cross-functional team makes sense in a particular setup.
>
>
> My understanding is that the benefits of a cross-functional feature team lie in helping people better deliver customer value by
>
> - team helping each other to get things done
>
> - keeping focus on the feature with common backlog and low total WIP
>
> - reducing hand-offs
>
> - etc.
>
>
> Now the problem is that we have no full stack developers after a recent reorg; frontendists have JavaScript-based stack, backendists Java-based stack with little shared knowledge and technology. It seems to me that the above points are not satisfied:
>
> - the two groups cannot help each so much due to little shared knowledge and unidirectional dependencies
>
> - the two groups frequently get out of sync because, e.g., designs for new features must be prepared in advance; this leads to high total WIP
>
> - because of the out-of-sync problem and unidirectional dependencies, there are still hand-offs, just hidden inside the team
>
>
> Separating the teams smells with waterfall, but does joining the two groups together in a team outweigh the cost in this case?
>
> Does it make sense to split the frontend team and perhaps make the backend part more cross-functional towards the core of the system instead?
>
> Does anyone have successful experience with frontend+backend teams without full-stack developers (or teams with little shared knowledge in general)?
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jan
>
>
>
>
------------------------------------
Posted by: "Alexander Kriegisch" <[email protected]>
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