The whole-team approach is a collaborative approach where all the team members with necessary skills and knowledge will do their best to accomplish the goal thus contributing to the success of the project.
- A Product Owner who is the customer representative is also part of the team.
- The Agile teams are small usually not exceeding 7 team members plus or minus 2 team members, stable and cross functional.
- Everyone in the team is seated at same physical location, ideally no barriers between them to enable smooth communication.
- All the Scrum ceremonies are attended by everyone where the progress of the assigned task is discussed and any potential road blocks are raised.
- In this way the whole-team approach helps in building healthier and stronger teams for improving team bonding and synergy.
The benefits of this approach in Agile software product development are
- Helps team in building strong working relationships through effective cooperation, teamwork and communication.
- Helps team members to learn and share knowledge from each other.
- Making everyone in the collectively responsible for the outcome
Quality is one of the key parameters that whole agile whole team is responsible for.
- It involves both developers and testers supporting each other at every step.
- This includes creating acceptance tests, creating suitable test strategy and building an automation test suite.
- The developers and testers can often have informal meetings to work out the strategy to create a new product increment.
- “Power of three” is a collaborating concept which involves developers, testers and business representatives in discussing and finalizing the features to work on, in future.
For example: Testers can log defects in a tracking tool and collaborate with developers to replicate it and get it fixed in the same iteration, which will always add more value to the product quality, rather than testers just think that their only job is to just raise defects.
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