Feature Teams Collaboratively Building Products from READY to DONE

Abstract

In this paper we describe our Project Team’s journey from a process where design and planning work was performed away from development team to one where small cross-functional Feature Teams self-organized to complete design, planning, and construction within the same sprint. We introduced a process that allows User Interaction Designers and Business Analysts to work in sync with the Developers and QA Analysts within a sprint. Each member of the Feature Team is involved in getting READY, planning, executing and being DONE. By introducing this process, we observed an increase in team morale, better, more predictable results and accumulation of less debt, while at the same time maintaining a constant velocity. Our process is a deviation from the established approach where upfront work needs to be ready before starting a sprint.