Title: Scaling Agile @ Spotify with Tribes, Squads, Chapters and Guilds
Authors: Henrik Kniberg and Anders Ivarsson
Issued: 2012
Availability: download is for free on crisp.se
The Spotify-model is a popular framework for organizing the work of multiple agile teams or of an entire large corporation. In their short book, the authors summarized the challenges they faced and the way they resolved them. The Spotify-model quickly became a reference for large organizations applying agile processes. Though there are several frameworks, solutions addressing the problems of adopting agile organization-wide, this book is a ‘must-read’.
In fact, the Spotify-model is more of a sample (from the past) than an elaborate model. It is a solution for developing an agile matrix model from the following building blocks (as seen on the cover):
- Squads are the agile teams, such as a Scrum Team. They are called squads because they may decide to use Kanban, XP or any agile framework that best suits their work. These squads are fairly autonomous and independent, therefore they only use scrum of scrums when it is inevitable. Operation teams are also organized as squads.
- A tribe is a collection of squads that work in related areas. They have their own product owners and product backlogs, however, they may find synergies in their work.
- Chapters are groups of specialist working in different squads of the same tribe. Let’s say one of the squads has a terrific Jenkins expert who can help in the professional development of QA experts of other squads.
- A guild is the wide community of specialists working at the entire organization. Guilds help to uphold the same professional standards across the entire organization.
The model represented in Scaling Agile @ Spotify is utterly different from other scaled agile solutions. For instance, Nexus is entirely based on Scrum teams, while SAFe is a fairly complicated framework which is more suitable for conservative organizations.