What is your opinion about full-stack teams? I’m referring to teams where the desire is for every member to competently contribute at every point in the stack.
- Do they work?
- What has been your experience?
- Does team size and/or experience level inform your opinion?
- Do you notice an increase/decrease in quality?
- Do you notice an increase/decrease in team and product cohesion?
You mean people taking ages to release because the work is divided between multiple teams and each one is creating a slightly different feature?
Yes, I have seen that.
Or if you mean a team of generalists with an specialist here and there not suffering from this problem?
I have seen that too.
I have also seen people solve the specialization problem by making their own layer more general than it would technically need to be, and become about as productive as a full stack team. The interesting part is that I have only seen that done by generalists, so I really doubt a set of specialists-only teams can be really productive.
In your experience, is success dependent on each member (or most members) being T shaped?
It’s dependent on many members being T shaped. Not all, and I don’t know if “most”. But you need enough to handle the basic flow of the system and interact with all of the specialists.