Away team work is a critical component of high performance software organizations. It is a way for high priority teams to work around other teams’ manpower constraints to deliver software. Without a well established culture of away team project work your organization will default to a standard of ‘shut up and wait while your item is in the backlog’.
What is away team work exactly? Away team work is when your team implements a feature or integration in another team’s codebase. Strictly speaking in away team work the host team does not review or approve pull requests. Your team’s senior engineers will get approval at an architectural level then handle pull request review themselves.
The Away team process allows your team to unblock itself when dependencies don’t have manpower to spare. The key component is first that your team not the dependencies team does the work. Both the implementation, testing and code review. Some effort obviously is required of the host team, but it should be minimized.
Away team work acts as a release valve on the conflict between the host team’s priorities and potential client’s goals of delivering features to customers. If the host doesn’t have manpower available your team can provide the engineers to make it happen.
Without away team work your organization will have to make more tradeoffs on the scheduling side. More often than not you’ll have to pick a migration over the new feature. But Away team work would have enabled your organization as a whole to deliver both.
What do you need to make away team work happen?
The key thing is that you have to make a formal process that specifies the maximum standards. You can’t allow teams to be squeamish about it. If the requirement is that two senior engineers approve that’s fine. Or maybe only senior engineers can do away team work in your company. Thats fine but you need a formal standard to avoid negotiations happening on a per project basis.