| Newsgroups |
gmane.comp.programming.extreme-programming |
| Message-ID |
<[email protected]> |
20+ years of development across several industries,
in shops not knowing from agile, shops claiming to
be Agile (and not really being so) and shops quite
firmly in the ad hoc camp, shows me some threads
common across all.
o Small teams work better.
o Face-to-face communication is best.
o Remote work with people who intend sufficient
communication can approximate face-to-face for
effectiveness. Or not. Common understanding
is key.
o Silos usually are Bad.
o There is a size threshold beyond which your firm will
not be agile. I don't know what that size is for you,
but understanding usually exhibits a negative correlation
with size.
o People outside your system, or in other parts of it,
often want you to fix something that is someone else's
responsibility, something you SHOULDN'T touch if you
could. Often, they do not know this.
o No matter where you work, on what part of the system,
it is a system, and the more you can know about the
whole (technical AND business), the better for all
concerned.
o You can survive more serious upper-management mistakes
if your firm has a revenue stream.
And getting to the point you care about:
o People can learn stuff. Really.
o Whether you formally join teams together is an issue
distinct from how well the people WORK together. If
the structure gets in the way and you can change it,
do so. But foster working together however you can.
Jan Michelfeit [email protected] [extremeprogramming] wrote:
>
>
> 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: Larry Brunelle <[email protected]>
------------------------------------
To Post a message, send it to: [email protected]
To Unsubscribe, send a blank message to: [email protected]
ad-free courtesy of objectmentor.com