RE: [AM] Sharing information across the enterprise

I have not worked on a product line since well before discovering agility, but ever since then I have been wanting to try out the following strategy when I get the right opportunity:

1. You have project teams and one product line team.
2. The product line team consists of a pool of senior developers, each of whom:
- Is an active member of one of the projects teams (perhaps rotating among the project teams every month or 2).
- Meets for a few hours every week with the other members of the product line team to talk about global issues and solutions.
- Looks for components, patterns, practices, etc. in their project that should be shared with the other projects.
- Promotes the reuse in their project of the things that have been accumulated from the other projects.
3. If the shared components get large and complex enough, it could be worth considering having a separate project team or a subset of the product line team refactor them into an appropriate framework.

Replace "product line" with "enterprise", if you like.

Steven A. Gordon, Ph.D. 
Manager, Software Factory 
Arizona State University 
PO Box 875506 
Tempe, AZ 85287-9509 
http://sf.asu.edu 
(480)-727-6271


-----Original Message-----
From: J. B. Rainsberger [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: 06 February 2004 23:19
To: [email protected]
Subject: [AM] Sharing information across the enterprise

Stephen Cohen wrote:

> I haven't spent a lot of time pair programming ...
> How do you share approaches or warn of identified issues, across 
> projects? How is the knowledge circulated though out an enterprise?

Either by formal presentations or by rotating individuals across teams.

> I am accustomed to working on large programs with many concurrent 
> projects.  While high-communication methods work very well within a 
> project I have found it difficult to maintain across an entire program.

I'm not convinced that communication across projects is so important: 
each project has its own local conditions, including the specific people
involved, the tools, the schedule... so much so that I doubt there is much
of practical use that straddles multiple teams.
--
J. B. Rainsberger,
Diaspar Software Services
http://www.diasparsoftware.com :: +1 416 791-8603 Let's write software that
people understand

For more information about AM, visit the Agile Modeling Home Page at
www.agilemodeling.com

For more information about AM, visit the Agile Modeling Home Page at www.agilemodeling.com

For more information about AM, visit the Agile Modeling Home Page at www.agilemodeling.com
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