Lazycoder

Structure and composition of agile teams

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how agile teams are composed today and how they typically work in a workplace that is practicing agile. I’ve only been "living the agile lifestyle" for a couple of years now, at first all by myself(?!) and the past year and a half with agile teams.

One thing that I’ve noticed about the agile teams I’ve been a part of is that they are mostly composed on unitaskers. That is, they are composed of developers, who only write production code and tests, some sort of tester, who only test the production code, and project managers/project owners, who define the requirements

The way I’ve seen these teams work is that the PM/PO writes up a story, then the testers and developers ask the PO questions about the story and make suggestions/clarifications. Then the developers starting writing code while the testers start writing test scripts. Once the developers have finished the code and pushed it to a test environment, the testers test the code, report bugs, and the developers fix the bugs. Eventually, the code settles down and all the team members agree that the story is complete.

So it seems like all the team members are busy all the time, but if you read between the lines you see a lot of waiting. The testers are waiting for the developers to finish writing the code and deploy it to the test environment. Then the developers are waiting for the testers to finish testing so they can either fix the bugs or demo the code to the PO and close the story. The PO is usually waiting for everyone to finish their tasks so they can see the demo and close the story.

I’ve been toying with the idea of all developer teams. As the interation progresses, the developers pair up on stories, fixing problems as they go. Then the developers swap off and test the other pairs stories, fixing any defects they find as they test. To cut out the lag from deploying to a test environment.

We’ve also had some success pairing up developers with QA during development and testing where I’m working now.

What do you think?