The key for the team to remain autonomous is for external dependencies to be non-blocking, meaning that new features don’t sit idle, waiting for something to happen beyond the control of the team. For example, it’s extremely difficult to ensure that a separate QA team will be available to evaluate a new feature exactly when the product team finishes it. Teams have different workloads, priorities, and problems; and generally, there’s too much uncertainty in building and running software systems for a pre-defined schedule to succeed in coordinating multiple teams on the same stream of work.
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