Department Designations in Defining Tasks

So lately I have been battling the departments with breaking down the barriers and the historical definition of employees roles. Agile teams promote not only having different expertise on teams but allowing individuals to continue their career growth by taking on new challenges.

So a testing expert could pick up a coding task, a coding expert can pick up a documentation task or a documentation expert could pick up a testing task. If the team and the product owner are supportive, even in a team that has silo'd knowledge they can begin to break that down and begin to cross train each other and remove barriers to getting specific tasks completed.

I consider everything in a agile team development whether it be the code, the tests, the documentation, the training, the marketing material all of these items need to be developed, reviewed, and published and all of these go into having a potentially shipping product at the end of the iteration.

So in this light, the teams that I work with have gotten into the habit of labeling their tasks in the following manner:

• QA - test the system
• TP - document the system
• develop/write the code for the system

My argument to them is that QA is a department and as such this type of task designation associates this as not a team task but a dept task that does not or should not have any team member sign-up for the task. The only task items that do not have a department designations to them are the coding tasks.

Instead of designating departments I would like to see the tasks defined by what the action is, or even more preferably is to utilize the idea that task in Agile is a development task. Here is how I would define the tasks:

• develop the test, automation and execution to validate the system
• develop the documentation to enable a user to utlize the system
• develop the code to meet the UAC of the system

In this manner the task make no designation of who should do them, during the iteration planning meeting I would like to see the team discuss who is the best person to implement the task, and while the majority of the time that will fall to the department expert the team makes no assumptions that this will be the case and they sign up for tasks to make the team the most efficient and self organizing.