Basic Squad Organization

One key element that we have seen to be important in cloud adoption is the adoption of an Agile approach that is conducive to the kind of rapid, incremental decision-making that the cloud fosters. Many organizations that have successfully adopted the cloud (including IBM itself) have followed a key practice called the squad model. The squad model, originally formulated by Spotify, formalized several Agile best practices that were nascent in many organizations in the industry.

The fundamental unit of the squad model is the squad, a small (usually ten people or fewer), independent team made up of a set of development pairs. We strongly recommend the adoption of the practice of pair programming for reasons that we will describe later in Chapter 8 on Methodology.

In our version of the squad model, we often find it necessary to have two general types of squads: application development (or build) squads and specialized support squads. Each squad is made up of a squad...