Do you have more than one job title across the folks in your department? Do you have people who do analysis or requirements and don’t write code? Do you have testers? Do you have a user interface designer? or usability engineer? How about a dba?

Division of labor is a reality of life in any sizable IT shop or software product company. If you don’t have division of labor, you have a craft shop on a small scale – which is all very well – but the for the rest of us we need to solve the problems of software engineering in medium and large scale with levels of professionalism and competence that require division of labor.

I hope that the previous post makes it clear that iterative development is a fundamental premise here. Not only would I advocate iterative development, but I advocate its strong form in evolutionary development.

Working closely together is also the idea here, in the same way that any lean workcell requires close cooperation between team members in order to realize flow and continuous improvement.

As for the division of labor, it’s been my experience that most people in IT have job titles like “requirements analyst” and “software engineer” and “quality assurance engineer”. Unlike some voices in the Agile community, I’m saying there’s nothing wrong with those titles and nothing wrong with functionally aligned organizations. In the past, I might have taken a Scrummier view of that question, but since I’ve seen how things work at Corbis, I’ve completely changed my mind. The punch line of this series of articles is how to make those functional organizations work to everybody’s advantage. Another premise here is that, as a manager, you have some power to organize teams as you see fit.

As far as I’m concerned, Goldratt had the last word on multitasking, but I can summarize in a simple maxim:

Multitasking makes e v e r y t h i n g   t a k e   l o n g e r.

I was skimming The Secrets of Consulting and I came across this nugget: “…Many years ago, Sir Ronald…