Dynamic Reteaming, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4. Reduce Risk and Encourage Sustainability

There are several ways that changing up your team compositions can reduce risk in your company and strengthen the ties between the teams so that information is not lost if teams disband or if people leave. You can proactively manage the spread of information, the development of people, and the cohesion between teams through dynamic reteaming. Let’s explore.

Reteaming Decreases the Development of Knowledge Silos

The notion of “bus count” or “bus factor” is not new in the software industry. If you increase your bus count, which is the number of people who know about something—like a specialized technology in your company—you are safer.¹ If one of those people leaves, someone else knows enough about the technology to carry it on into the future, hopefully without too much pain. It’s building in redundancy of knowledge, which is better for your company—kind of like a group memory.

But it’s not good enough to just add people to teams to be safe. After all, you don’t want your individual teams to be too big because that can bring other problems unless managed and facilitated well. These problems might include longer meetings where not everyone speaks or is engaged, lack of visibility on work, difficulty making decisions, and poor coordination.

Within a team, pair programming and test-driven development (TDD) are ways to facilitate a more effective bus count within a team. The quality of interactions on the bus matters! If all the ...