[teampractices] Towards more holistic product/feature development

[Bryan Davis]

On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 6:26 PM, Diederik van Liere
<dvanliere at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 10:39 AM, Bryan Davis <bd808 at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>
>> A practice group is a cross-team collection of individuals who are
>> specialized or inclined to a particular role within each scrum team.
>> QA, UI/UX and Operations are common practice groups in larger
>> scrum shops {{Citation needed}}. Members of a practice group
>> communicate issues and learnings across teams to lift the standard
>> for their speciality across the organization.
>
> I believe that Steven's recent posts about Spotify and Yammer
> illustrate such practice groups. See for example Scaling Agile at
> Spotify @
> https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1018963/Articles/SpotifyScaling.pdf

Thanks for reminding me of this article. I spent some time at
$DAYJOB-1 championing a matrix based organizational shift inspired
by this exact article and some additional readings I had done. The end
result was a rejection by C-level management, but it still looks (at least
on paper) like a good way to organize a software development
organization to me. One of the aspects of Spotify's model that is
especially encouraging to me is that they aren't trying to push each
"squad" into using the exact same process. Scrum works well for some,
kanban works well for others, and from what I've seen in my brief time
at WMF the chaos of the bazaar model [0] works best for others.

[0] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/cathedral-bazaar/

Bryan
-- 
Bryan Davis              Wikimedia Foundation    <bd808 at wikimedia.org>
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]]  Sr Software Engineer                Boise, ID
irc: bd808                                        v:415.839.6885 x6855