Succeeding with Agile

Split and Seed

The split-and-seed pattern is typically put into use after the first couple of teams have adopted Scrum and run at least a handful of sprints. By that point, team members are beginning to understand what it is like to work on a Scrum team. They certainly won’t have figured everything out, but sprints should be ending with working software, and team members should be working together well. In short, the team probably has a long way to go to get good, but Scrum is starting to feel natural.

It is at this unlikely point that we split the team up.

In the split-and-seed pattern, one functioning Scrum team is split in two, with each half of the original team forming the basis of a new team. New people are then added to these splinter ...