There are four basic strategies, compared in Table 1, for organizing large or geographically distributed sub-teams:
- Component teams. With this approach each sub-team is responsible for one or more subsystems or modules, something that can be difficult if some of your team works alone from home, to reduce the amount of information sharing and collaboration required between disparate teams. Because component teams are effectively organized around your architecture you will need to invest sufficient time up front to identify that architecture.
- Feature teams. A feature team is responsible for implementing a functional requirement, such as a user story or use case, from end-to-end. This is often referred to as implementing a vertical slice of the solution. Sometimes a given feature team will focus on the requirements for a single line of business (LoB), such as brokerage or life insurance within a financial institution, enabling them to gain expertise in that LoB. Other times a feature team will take on requirements specific to a given application or system within your organization.
- Functional teams. Some large teams will be organized by development function – there is an architecture team, a development team, a testing team, a deployment team, and so on. Each team focuses on their specialized function and hands off their work to other functional teams.
- Internal open source teams. Sometimes a component or subsystem will be developed via an open source method, even though all of the work is private to your organization. Developers from other teams voluntarily work on the component to evolve it over time. When Scott was at IBM he saw this strategy work in practice for several important components reused within several IBM products. For some detailed thoughts on strategy, read Reuse Through Internal Open Source.
Table 1. Comparing the team organization approaches.
Team Approach | Advantages | Disadvantages | Considerations |
Component |
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Feature |
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Functional |
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Internal open source |
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|
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Note that these strategies can be, and often are, combined.