In large Agile projects where a Scrum team cannot deliver the full system, you have different options to organize your team. You can use feature teams that work on a set of user stories or component teams that work on a subsystem or component. In his blog post, Michael Valenta reports his experience as a ScrumMaster from the usage of features teams.
This situation is even more particular as we deal with a distributed Scrum team. After explaining the context of the project and how the different activities are performed in this distributed context, Michael Valenta reports the following challenges with distributed feature teams:
* Design decisions are longer to take as the full team need to be involved
* The transition to supporting feature teams needs time to be implemented in the organization. It is hard to change from a culture where people are specialized by technical layer to a team that is responsible of everything.
His conclusion is that “Having worked using both our old development process and our new feature teams based approach, I firmly believe that we need the feature team approach to make continuous delivery work. Having team members who are able to focus on the feature and are in regular communications has been instrumental in successfully completing our feature.”
Read the complete experience report on https://jazz.net/blog/index.php/2013/09/12/feature-team-experience-report/