Succeeding with Agile

Do a Little Bit of Everything All the Time

Teams used to a sequential development process have become accustomed to hand-offs between specialists. Analysts hand their work to designers who hand it to programmers who pass it on to testers. Each of these hand-offs includes some overhead in the form of meetings, documents to read and perhaps sign, and so on. In part because of this overhead, the hand-offs tend to be of large amounts of functionality. In the purest meaning of a waterfall process, the entire application is handed from group to group.

Teams that are new to Scrum often do not go far enough in eliminating these hand-offs. They often make the assumption that the programmers should finish programming a product backlog item before handing ...