Dr. Dobb's Journal - July 2008 - (Page 61)

various subteams, and their goal is to coordinate the management aspects of the overall team. At scale it isn’t sufficient to simply focus on project leadership—the technical aspects of project management, such as dependency management, contract management, resource tracking, and vendor management become more critical due to the inherent complexities of large projects. This team is likely to have a short coordination meeting each day, referred to as a “scrum of scrums” in the Scrum methodology, where current status is shared and issues are identified. • The architecture ownership team is comprised of the architecture owners from the subteams and is responsible for architecture envisioning at the beginning of the project (www.agilemodeling.com/essays/initialArchitect ureModeling.htm) to identify the initial technical direction and provide a basis for organizing the subteams. In the first week or so of the project, their goal is to identify the subsystems and their interfaces, a strategy called “managing to the seams” reducing the , coupling between subsystems and thereby reducing the amount of coordination required by subteams. Throughout the project this team will meet on a regular basis to share ideas and resolve technical issues, particularly those surrounding changes to the interfaces of subsystems. They may choose to meet daily (this is particularly common at the beginning of the project) but as the architecture stabilizes, it is common to see them meet once or twice a week. • The product ownership team is comprised of the product owners of each subteam and is responsible for coordinating the requirements effort across the subteams. They will need to negotiate requirements with the larger body of stakeholders whom they represent and divvy them out among the subteams appropriately. They’ll also need to negotiate the inevitable disputes between subteams as to who should do what and what a requirement actually means. This is a challenging job, and as I described in “Scaling On-Site Customer” (www.ddj.com/architect/ 204801134), the product owners need solid business analysis skills. The coordinators will collaborate as appropriate—they don’t need to wait for their official meetings to communicate— putting people together teams to resolve issues as needed. Coordination naturally becomes more complicated when your team is distributed, particularly when subteams are in different time zones. Figure 2: Organizing a medium-sized agile team. Architecture owners and independent testers are needed on more complex agile teams. Figure 3: Organizing a large agile team. Large agile programs are organized as teams of teams, just like large traditional programs. Figure 1: Organizing a small agile team. Agile teams of 10 people or less are organized in a simple manner. July 2008 l www.ddj.com l Dr. Dobb’s Journal 61 http://www.ddj.com/architect/204801134 http://www.ddj.com/architect/204801134 http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/initialArchitectureModeling.htm http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/initialArchitectureModeling.htm http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/initialArchitectureModeling.htm http://www.rallydev.com http://www.rallydev.com http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - July 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - July 2008 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook Engineers Without Borders Conversations Patricia Tries Event-Based Architectures Graphs Versus Objects Lock-Free Queues Dr. Dobb’s Architecture & Design World Java and the Nokia N10 Internet Tablet Effective Concurrency The Agile Edge Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - July 2008

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