Vertical vs Horizontal

Let's talk about another important concept, Vertical Slicing in an Agile development. Here is how it works. 

Just to bring everyone on the same page, in Horizontal slicing approach, project is broken primarily along Architecture lines. So there are several teams working on a particular phase of the project, mainly in serial. This clearly has advantage when it comes to doing things in a consistent ways. It's however less resilient to changes in the requirements.Plus the team can't deliver the product anything until things are integrated and All Bells & Whistle are in place, due to interdependency. 
This is where we do things differently in the Vertical Approach.Project Management Office (PMO) and executives divide the team into Verticals. These verticals work collaboratively on common delivering a working product. That puts the TEAM in a great position to deliver working product in a timely manner within the budget. Plus there is no overhead of putting all the pieces of the puzzle together towards the end. 


I must mention here that although Vertical approach is great and works in most of the environments, one shouldn't consider it without performing the complete analysis. There are perfectly legitimate situations where horizontal slicing is the best fit ..


-S