Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from “Waterfalling Backward”

Why Are Whole Teams Hard to Create?

Traditional software development organizational structures have advocated for teams that specialize in technology and are grouped by a common discipline, for example, development, test, user documentation, and so on. The reasoning goes that teams composed of people with similar skills can help each other within their own domains. Furthermore, it is believed that teams that share a common discipline can be “time-sliced” across various projects as needed instead of focusing on one project at a time. This is the epitome of the “job-shop” mentality in which engineers just do their specific job and lose sight of the bigger picture. Unfortunately, optimizing the efficiency of a particular discipline almost always ...