Structuring Development Teams for Agile Methodology

Empowering Team Autonomy in Agile Development

Question

Your company has 60 developers who are assigned to four teams. Each team has 15 members.

The company uses an agile development methodology.

You need to structure the work of the development teams so that each team owns their respective work while working together to reach a common goal.

Which parts of the taxonomy should you enable the team to perform autonomously?

Answers

Explanations

Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer

A. B. C. D.

A

A feature typically represents a shippable component of software.

Features, examples:

-> Add view options to the new work hub

-> Add mobile shopping cart

-> Support text alerts

-> Refresh the web portal with new look and feel

User Stories and Tasks are used to track work. Teams can choose how they track bugs, either as requirements or as tasks

Incorrect Answers:

B, C: An epic represents a business initiative to be accomplished.

Epics, examples:

-> Increase customer engagement

-> Improve and simplify the user experience

-> Implement new architecture to improve performance

-> Engineer the application to support future growth

-> Support integration with external services

-> Support mobile apps

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/boards/backlogs/define-features-epics https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/boards/work-items/about-work-items

To structure the work of the development teams, it is important to understand the various levels of work items in agile development methodology. The most commonly used levels of work items are Initiatives, Epics, Features, User Stories, and Tasks.

Initiatives are high-level organizational goals that are long-term and strategic in nature. They usually span multiple teams and may take months or even years to complete.

Epics are large, user-centric initiatives that are broken down into smaller pieces of work. They are long-term and often span multiple sprints or iterations.

Features are smaller pieces of work that are derived from epics. They are more specific and well-defined than epics, and usually take a few weeks to complete.

User Stories are the smallest unit of work in agile development methodology. They are typically a few sentences long and describe a specific feature or functionality that a user needs.

Tasks are specific activities that need to be completed to implement a user story. They are usually a few hours to a day in length and are assigned to individual team members.

In this scenario, we have four teams of 15 developers each, which means each team needs to work independently while collaborating with the other teams to achieve a common goal. To achieve this, it is recommended to enable the teams to perform autonomously on the Features and Epics levels.

Enabling the teams to work on Features allows them to work independently and own their respective work. The Features level is well-defined and specific, and it usually takes a few weeks to complete. Each team can work on their own set of features, and they can collaborate with other teams to ensure that their features are aligned with the overall goal.

Enabling the teams to work on Epics allows them to collaborate with other teams and work towards a common goal. The Epics level is larger than Features and requires coordination among teams. Each team can own a specific part of the epic and collaborate with other teams to ensure that the entire epic is completed successfully.

Therefore, the correct answer is C. Epics and Features.