What constitutes the ideal agile team in terms of roles and functionality?
Mike: The ideal agile team is basically a construct that means we’re going to organize a group of people around delivering end‑to‑end features back to the business. So that team has developers, it has QA testers, analysts, UX people, product people, [and] customers — anything that it needs to actually deliver that end‑to‑end slice. A lot of large enterprises, we’re finding, are actually not organized necessarily around that end‑to‑end slice. They’re organized around possibly like a component within a larger system’s architecture, not a layer within the architecture but a major sub‑system kind of component. When I think of the ideal agile team, what I think about is a group of people that have everything necessary to be able to deliver some capability back to the business, whether that be a service in like a service‑oriented architecture, or a feature that a customer would actually consume. DZone: There’s often a sort of tug‑of‑war between the functional manager’s needs and the project
