Traditional software development relied heavily on separate teams of specialists. The back end team. The front end team. The architecture team. The QA team. The deployment team.

That was a highly ineffective approach.

No single team was able to completely own and deliver a product into production, causing friction, inefficiency, and unpredictability.

Scrum turns this concept on its head, where each cross-functional team has all the skills required to create value every sprint. However, many teams still fall into the trap of over specialization. Back end developers can only work on the back end. Front end developers only the front end, and so on. But what happens when the business requires work that’s not evenly balanced between those disciplines?

The answer is “T-shaped teams,” where each team member has an area of deep expertise (the vertical part of the T), but also has general skills to contribute to the overall goal of shipping software (the horizontal part of the T).

In this session, software development expert and agile author Dave Todaro will talk about the pitfalls of over-specialization, and techniques to turn groups of specialists into high-performing, unified Scrum teams capable of high throughput, high quality, and high predictability.

Key takeaways:
* The dangers of over-specialization on a Scrum team
* Techniques to develop additional skills within the team
* Tricks to keep everyone productive--especially at the end of a sprint
* Slicing tips to avoid user stories that deliver no value to the user (front end stories, back end stories, etc.)
* How to deal with skepticism from your team members