Scaling Development Teams: Feature vs Component Teams
Managing multiple software development teams presents unique challenges. As your organization expands and new developers join the ranks, dividing teams becomes inevitable for optimizing performance, collaboration, quality, and timely delivery.
In this article, we’ll delve into the nuances of Feature Teams and Component Teams (also known as Domain Teams) to help you make informed decisions about team structure.
Building high-functioning teams is a complex endeavor, with numerous considerations to address from inception to execution. As the organization expands, the importance of strategic team structuring is underscored.
As your development organization grows and new talent joins the ranks, one of the foremost challenges lies in team division to mitigate overhead and bolster efficiency. With larger teams often translating to slower, less efficient processes, strategic team splitting becomes imperative to streamline operations and empower teams with autonomy.
There are multiple aspects of dividing the teams into multiple groups. In our previous article, we explored the differences between cross-functional and split-stack teams.
In this article, we delve into another angle of team segmentation: whether you should divide your teams into Feature Teams or Component Teams. Before we get into the details, let’s look at the definition of Feature Teams and Component Teams.
What is a Feature Team
A cross-functional team, responsible for delivering end-to-end features of a software product. Feature Teams are organized around delivering complete features from conception to deployment. Each feature team includes members with diverse skill sets, including frontend and backend development, testing, design, and other necessary expertise.
What is a Component Team
A specialized group within an organization that is responsible for a specific function or domain of the software. These teams could be composed of individuals with expertise in a particular area, such as backend, frontend, database management, or infrastructure or they may consist of a combination of these expertise as the Feature Teams. But can be a sub-section of these as well.
Component Teams work collaboratively to fulfill their designated responsibilities within the larger context of the software development process. While Component Teams may collaborate with other teams and stakeholders, their primary focus is on delivering value within their specialized area of expertise.
Examples of the domain could be given as orders, checkout, campaigns, landing page, etc. for an e-commerce product.
Differences Between Feature Teams and Component Teams
Delivery
- Feature Teams are faster in delivery due to cross-functionality and less dependency between peers and teams. Since the team is capable of developing the artifact from beginning to end, they can deliver it in a shorter period. As more Feature Teams you have, it is more likely to decrease the speed of the deliveries you will have.
- Component Teams, split the responsibility of the domains among themselves, on the occasions that the features depend on other domains, the delivery speed will drag behind. But for the items that don’t depend, the speed will accelerate as the developers get experienced in the domain over time.
Outcomes
- Feature Teams, owning the functionality from beginning to end gives more autonomy. Therefore, they can plan their work by themselves without relying on any crucial updates from other teams. This makes the outcomes of the Feature Teams more visible.
- Component Teams are only responsible for one domain at a time. Most of the time they depend on the other domain teams to complete their work to serve the clients. In these occasions, the development team’s effort will not be visible until the functionality gets published in live, or will not be measured individually at all due to collaborative effort.
Holistic Vision
- Feature Teams don’t take a side and develop what is most important at that moment. Therefore they should build expertise on the global level of the product. This gives a holistic vision to the development team, and they tend to understand the client’s use scenarios more genuinely.
- Component Teams do not need to be experts on each product domain. They are only responsible for their domain(s) extensively. This creates knowledge siloing in the organization and knowledge asymmetry among the teams and their members.
Domain Knowledge
- Feature Teams have a holistic vision, but most of the time they are not an expert on a specific topic or domain. Therefore, improving the specific parts of the domain will be harder for them. The architecture set by this team might be flaky and needs to be revisited over time due to focusing only on one functionality at a time, and not looking from a broader perspective.
- Component Teams are responsible for a narrower domain count at a time on a deeper level, they can see the current needs of the domain and its future. Therefore, the Component Teams can build a well-structured architecture for the product.
Plans and Dependencies
- Feature Teams rarely depend on other Feature Teams, unless they create a very big feature that cannot be delivered by one team at a time. Therefore, when developing new functionality, they don’t need to plan the dependencies and all the waits each time. They only plan their work and execute it.
- Component Teams are not capable of delivering functionality by themselves on some occasions. They need to integrate their work with other teams’ artifacts and release them all together. Before a functionality is built, each team’s Product Owner should align about the dependencies, timeline, and scope. They may not take the issues to the same iteration some of the time and this multiplies the amount of time needed to deliver the functionality. Also, some domains may have a greater backlog while others are having trouble finding valuable work items.
Quality
- Feature Teams develop the functionality from their perspective and requirements. Often, they will not rely on other teams and their backlog. Therefore, they may have functionalities that touch the same services or existing functionalities. This may cause stepping into others' toes, inconsistent architecture, rising bug numbers, complaints from developers, and eventually serving a bad product to the clients. Also, when a bug arises, the developers may not know who and when developed the functionality that the bug included.
- Component Teams have higher ownership and extensive knowledge of their domains. They tend to build a better architecture and technical framework since the responsibilities are split with clear lines. A downside of this might be the error logs that circulate repeatedly among the teams. The developers may not see the root cause and the domain and assign the bug to another team, or the reporter of the bug may tend to create the bug mostly on the same domain teams.
Scale
- When scaling the Feature Teams, more teams can be added to the organization, and expect them to deliver the functionalities as the other teams do. When a new team is built the performance of the new team usually will be low, but will increase over time as the developers get experience over the product overall. Also, having too many Feature Teams is not healthy for the organization due to the teams will need to be working on the same component at the same time, and a higher risk of having spaghetti code.
- When Component Teams scale, they will add new domains to the product or split the existing domains. A key here is dividing the domains as meaningful as it can be. If the teams cannot divide properly, higher risk of failure.
Important Points to Consider
The “component” or “domain” notion may vary among the organizations. When choosing the Component Teams, the most important thing is deciding the cutting line of the domains. If one domain touches other teams’ work areas too much, it is much more likely you will have planning, dependency, resource, and delivery challenges.
Also, you may have a hard time filling the backlogs of some of the Component Teams due to poorly adjusted domains. If a team’s backlog is full and other ones are suffering to find a valuable work item, you have to reconsider your division of the domains again.
Feature Teams are easy to manage for small organizations. Almost all organizations start as Feature Teams with a couple of software developers. But when the organization expands, the more overhead you have to think about and the more responsibility you have to give your product and engineering leads. Because they will be the ones that hold the pieces together.
Not all of the Feature Team members need to be experts on the product end-to-end. The whole team is responsible for delivering the functionalities to the clients and they can split the responsibilities between them. But eventually, it would be better to share the knowledge between them for a holistic vision.
Conclusion
Although Feature Teams look like a better approach for a small organization and Component Teams are for a bigger organization structure, there are lots of good examples of opposite working well that can be seen quite widely throughout the industry.
Both team structures have their own advantages and disadvantages when splitting an organization into multiple teams. Depending on the industry, product, organization size, and business stage, each method can lead to different outcomes. Understanding the organization's current condition and the medium/long-term plans will play a significant role in shaping the organization.
