Deliver Value Through the Architecture

You may be accustomed to teams working across the architecture, as in the GUI person does the GUI for several features, and the platform people develop platform libraries. You see this when people work in “front end” or “back end” teams. Agile teams deliver through the architecture. Author Bill Wake originated the term “slice of cake” to explain how teams implement in vertical slices.^[12]

Your team might have a front-end person and a back-end person on the team. As shown in the figure that follows, the team might have a middleware person and an app-layer person. The team works as a team to deliver value by implementing by feature through the architecture. In this figure, the squiggly lines indicate a small and complete story through the architecture, one slice.

When teams deliver value through the architecture, one small slice at a time, they get feedback early. They rarely deliver a large feature set that doesn’t meet someone’s needs. Teams that deliver slices can release something when they want to. Teams that deliver slices learn early what their product owner or customer wants.

Remember that the more narrow the slice, the more often the team can release.

While your team might start with back-end, middleware, and front-end people, encourage the team members to become generalizing specialists. That will avoid the ​Trap: The Team Consists of Narrow Experts​.