What should you do to reduce this problem?

You work for a large financial institution. Your products have many interdependencies: you have mobile, web, and ATM product interfaces to financial products like savings, checking, credit card, and investments. When any of these financial products change, the changes ripple throughout the mobile, web, and ATM clients, and maintaining consistency is challenging.

What should you do to reduce this problem? (choose the best answer)
A . Form products that are as independent as possible and let each product determine their own release plans, but ensure coordination.
B. Create a centralized, coordinated cross-product Development Plan to ensure consistency.
C. Appoint an overall Product Owner to oversee all the products.
D. Ensure that the PMO manages the inter-product dependencies.
E. All of the above.

View Answer

Answer: A

Explanation:

What the Scrum Guide says: “Cross-functional teams have all competencies needed to accomplish the work without depending on others not part of the team. The team model in Scrum is designed to optimize flexibility, creativity, and productivity.”

The ordering of the Product Backlog is a key mechanism for reducing and eliminating dependencies. Dependencies are things that need to happen for an Agile in scale to complete an increment of value, but that cannot be achieved by the team alone. Dependencies, if not handled correctly, lead to blockers in task execution.

In scrum, the product backlog is the main planning tool used to inform the direction of the team. Broadly speaking, the product backlog consists of tasks (often called stories or user stories) with well-defined acceptance criteria. A good user story is scoped and written to follow INVEST (independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small, and testable). The concept of independence is key to the idea of managing external dependencies. If a piece of work is completely independent, it has no dependencies whatsoever. While this is something we should strive for, it is not always attainable. There is value in cross-functional, cross-vertical initiatives, and so we must plan for and manage dependencies.