Advice needed
Hello,
Needed expert advice on the following below. Would appreciate your inputs and thoughts. Thanks in advance.
We are a team of 8, as part of year-end budget fulfillment, management is hiring 8 more resources (4 Dev, 2 QA, 2 BA). That makes our 16 member team with 1 scrum master. per my knowledge, agile process works best with team size 7-8. How do we handle this surge in team size?
1. Can we spilt this team into 2 sub- teams?
2. If yes, do we have 2 seperate daily- stand ups?
3. How do we apprise meeting minutes to both teams cohesively?
4. How do developers handle application changes/ code changes etc, to ensure there are no conflicts to the code base and one-developer work is interfering with another?
5. How should both teams interact with other, to ensure there is smooth continous communication without any gaps in understanding?
Would truly appreciate your expert thoughts.
Regards,
SR
There are multiple questions, let me try -
1. Though it may be good but not mandate to split the team and why just 2 and why not 3 or 4? Let them start working together, face the issues and find out the solution themselves.
2. Each Scrum team should do their own Daily Scrum. There is nothing called Daily Standup in Scrum
3. Teams can do a Scrum of Scrum after their team's Daily Scrum to apprise any cross team dependency. At-least one member from each team should attend it, they can decide the frequency of it - daily, alternate day, weekly, whatever works for them
4. Refine your DoD to include the "Integrated Increment as an outcome". Also upgrade your Engineering practices to follow the Continuous Integration, use build automation with automated test suite
5. Use Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, Scrum of Scrum etc.. as a touch point.
Hope this helps
I don't see the Product Owner mentioned here.
Will the backlog be split between the two teams? will there be one Product Owner for the total backlog and two new Prod Owners for the two teams? Will the backlog be devided in Features and handled by the two teams accordingly?
If there is One product then One Product Backlog and One PO. Based upon the ordering/prioritization done by the PO teams can pick up the items from the same Product Backlog
Teams should be working on the most valuable items first, that means multiple teams working on the same feature but different PBIs.
Did the team ask management to provide 8 additional members? If so, what was the team's thinking about how this change would be accommodated?
If the team didn't ask for this 8-person increase, what do they think about such a change being imposed? What are the implications for their ability to self-organize?
Thanks Sanjay, Nicko and Ian for your expert inputs. This is indeed helpful. Our current approach is to continue having one team, keep a tab on any issues encountered during the sprint and implement any lessons learnt during team retro.