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

Cross-Component Teams

Software composed of multiple architectural components is often built by separate teams that develop their respective components independently. There may be a database team, an application server team, a user interface team, and so forth. After the components are developed, the parts are put together to create the product as a whole and tested during an integration phase. Teams working on a single component find this a convenient way to work because they can easily capitalize on their common knowledge. However, the overall focus of the work becomes rather narrow, and it can be tempting to hand off responsibility for some component to a remote team, further isolating the various parts of an organization. Individual component ...