Comprehensive and Detailed In-Depth Explanation:In an Agile Scrum environment with two teams working on the same application in parallel, effective work division is critical to avoid cross-dependency, which can lead to delays, conflicts, and inefficiencies. Appian's Agile Development Best Practices emphasize team autonomy and minimizing dependencies to ensure smooth progress.
* Option B (Group epics and stories by feature, and allocate work between each team by feature):
This is the recommended approach. By dividing the application's functionality into distinct features (e.
g., Team 1 handles customer management, Team 2 handles campaign tracking), each team can work independently on a specific domain. This reduces cross-dependency because teams are not reliant on each other's deliverables within a sprint. Appian's guidance on multi-team projects suggests feature- based partitioning as a best practice, allowing teams to own their backlog items, design, and testing without frequent coordination. For example, Team 1 can develop and test customer-related interfaces while Team 2 works on campaign processes, merging their work during integration phases.
* Option A (Group epics and stories by technical difficulty, and allocate one team the more challenging stories):This creates an imbalance, potentially overloading one team and underutilizing the other, which can lead to morale issues and uneven progress. It also doesn't address cross-dependency, as challenging stories might still require input from both teams (e.g., shared data models), increasing coordination needs.
* Option C (Allocate stories to each team based on the cumulative years of experience of the team members):Experience-based allocation ignores the project's functional structure and can result in mismatched skills for specific features. It also risks dependencies if experienced team members are needed across teams, complicating parallel work.
* Option D (Have each team choose the stories they would like to work on based on personal preference):This lacks structure and could lead to overlap, duplication, or neglect of critical features. It increases the risk of cross-dependency as teams might select interdependent stories without coordination, undermining parallel development.
Feature-based division aligns with Scrum principles of self-organization and minimizes dependencies, making it the most effective strategy for this scenario.
References:Appian Documentation - Agile Development with Appian, Scrum Guide - Multi-Team Coordination, Appian Lead Developer Training - Team Management Strategies.