I ask you- what do you think is the most important characteristic of an Agile team?  If you were to ask me, I would answer with cross-functional teams; I believe they are one of the most important contributors to success with Agile. A cross-functional team is ideally staffed with developers, testers, doc writers, and any other discipline necessary in order to complete user stories within the team.  At times, a team may add on a certain role, i.e. DBA, to assist with a particular iteration, but by and large a cross-functional team has what it needs to get the job done.

Cross-Functional and Self-Managing

One of the reasons for this is that the team strives to be self-managing, and to have that ability you need to be able to control your own destiny.  This is a bit of a chicken and egg thing… what came first cross-functional or self-managing?  These characteristics allow an Agile team to make their own decisions, collaborate amongst the team for the best ways to do things, allows team members to assist other team members when they have free cycles, and fosters a self motivated team that wants to succeed.  After all, the team sets its own priorities (to a certain extent) and then has the responsibility and accountability to produce.

Communication is Key to Cross-Functional Teams

For many of these functions to occur, and for them to be maintainable, you need to have a high level of communication between team members.  That’s just one of the reason why we do things like daily stand-ups, sort of a forced daily communication between all members of the team.  In addition to daily stand-ups we also have things like story boards, task boards, and burndown charts that are usually displayed and updated in a very open environment, again to facilitate openness and communication.  Better to know about something now then 3 weeks from now, whether its bad or good, right?