Changes in Agile - lesson on working with multiple teams

Agile is good, Agile is bad. Agile means having a positive attitude on changes.  We're not afraid of changes, so the major thing to think about is how to manage those changes.  I always feel that "Agile is too fast", "Agile is too much changes". Boss will always love to see the amazing productivity that his people create. Only the one in the team knows, we were on the edge of Chaos.

From our experience, the most difficult thing to deal is not to response to those application change request but to how to manage and cooperate in teams.  The team used to work an application which shared a branch with other teams.  It was a nightmare time. One day, the last check-in code broke the release; Another day, someone deleted the common files and broke the whole group, while the developer planed to clean up things and thought nobody had used it. Then, other teams broke the environment after a new change list.  We are in a mess!  People will get pissed off on those days, blockers, broken,  and it happened. People learnt from those lessons and get smart to think of improvement. 

Tips for cross-team work:

1. higher visibility requires higher standard on stability: application stability, environment stability

2. keep a code freeze time scheduled to avoid last code check-in before release

3. enhance communication, build process on cross-team code review and overall notifications 

4. add a switch for specified features and make sure it can be turned off in a quick round

5. get approval before make shared files changing

6. skills on people management: make sure the team as stable as possible