Create Your Successful Agile Project

Recognize Team Traps

As you try to create collaborative cross-functional teams, you may encounter problems such as these:

• Your team is a component team.

• Everyone on your team is a narrow expert.

• The developers and testers don’t work together, but rather in staggered iterations.

• The team’s membership isn’t stable, so the team has trouble learning to work together.

• The team pushes to finish work.

• The team cannot solve its own problems.

• Team members have a history and culture of individual work, not collective work.

You can work to overcome these traps. Here are ways that might work for you.

Trap: Your Teams Are Component Teams

You have a cross-functional team, but the team works across the layers of the architecture. Or you have a cross-functional ...