Kent Beck
2004-10-18 16:55:49 UTC
Whole Team
Include on the team people with all the skills and perspectives
necessary for the project to succeed. This is really nothing more than
the old idea of cross-functional teams. The name reflects the purpose of
the practice, a sense of wholeness on the team, the ready availability
of all the resources necessary to succeed. Where intense interactions
are necessary for the health of the project, those interacting should be
primarily identified with the team and not their functions.
People need a sense of "team":
* We belong.
* We are in this together.
* We support each others' work, growth, and learning.
What constitutes a "whole team" is dynamic. If a set of skills or
attitudes becomes important, bring a person with these skills on the
team. If someone is no longer necessary, he can go elsewhere. For
example, if your project requires many changes to a database, you will
need a database administrator on the team. When the need for database
changes diminishes that person no longer needs to be part of the team,
at least for that function.
An issue that often arises is ideal team size. The Tipping Point by
Malcolm Gladwell describes two discontinuities in team size: 12 and 150.
Many organizations; military, religious, and business; split teams when
they cross these thresholds. Twelve is the number of people who can
comfortably interact with each other in a day. With more than 150 people
on a team, you can no longer recognize the faces of everyone on your
team. Across both of these thresholds it is harder to maintain trust,
and trust is necessary for collaboration. For larger projects, finding
ways to fracture the problem so it can be solved by a team of teams
allows XP to scale up.
Some organizations try to have teams with fractional people: "You'll
spend 40% of your time working for these customers and 60% work for
those customers." In this case, so much time is wasted on task-switching
that you can see immediate improvement by grouping the programmers into
teams. The team responds to the customers' needs. This frees the
programmers from fractured thinking. The customer receives the benefit
of the expertise of the whole team as needed. People need acceptance and
belonging. Identifying with this program on Mondays and Thursdays and
that program on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, without having other
programmers to identify with, destroys the sense of "team" and is
counterproductive.
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Include on the team people with all the skills and perspectives
necessary for the project to succeed. This is really nothing more than
the old idea of cross-functional teams. The name reflects the purpose of
the practice, a sense of wholeness on the team, the ready availability
of all the resources necessary to succeed. Where intense interactions
are necessary for the health of the project, those interacting should be
primarily identified with the team and not their functions.
People need a sense of "team":
* We belong.
* We are in this together.
* We support each others' work, growth, and learning.
What constitutes a "whole team" is dynamic. If a set of skills or
attitudes becomes important, bring a person with these skills on the
team. If someone is no longer necessary, he can go elsewhere. For
example, if your project requires many changes to a database, you will
need a database administrator on the team. When the need for database
changes diminishes that person no longer needs to be part of the team,
at least for that function.
An issue that often arises is ideal team size. The Tipping Point by
Malcolm Gladwell describes two discontinuities in team size: 12 and 150.
Many organizations; military, religious, and business; split teams when
they cross these thresholds. Twelve is the number of people who can
comfortably interact with each other in a day. With more than 150 people
on a team, you can no longer recognize the faces of everyone on your
team. Across both of these thresholds it is harder to maintain trust,
and trust is necessary for collaboration. For larger projects, finding
ways to fracture the problem so it can be solved by a team of teams
allows XP to scale up.
Some organizations try to have teams with fractional people: "You'll
spend 40% of your time working for these customers and 60% work for
those customers." In this case, so much time is wasted on task-switching
that you can see immediate improvement by grouping the programmers into
teams. The team responds to the customers' needs. This frees the
programmers from fractured thinking. The customer receives the benefit
of the expertise of the whole team as needed. People need acceptance and
belonging. Identifying with this program on Mondays and Thursdays and
that program on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, without having other
programmers to identify with, destroys the sense of "team" and is
counterproductive.
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$9.95 domain names from Yahoo!. Register anything.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/J8kdrA/y20IAA/yQLSAA/nhFolB/TM
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Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xpbookdiscussiongroup/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
xpbookdiscussiongroup-unsubscribe-***@public.gmane.org
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/