It should be clear that, as developers go off to do the technical work of implementing the features for which they have signed up, there is the risk of creating little islands of technology, which do not integrate well into a coherent product. This risk, of course, exists in traditional as well as in agile projects, and the collaborative techniques of agile PMs should assist in minimising integration problems. Still, agile PMs must guard against this contingency, and the mechanism typically used for this often is referred to in the agile community as "frequent integration." Most experienced PMs can cite an initiative in which all of the separate elements were tested and performing appropriately, only to find that, when put together, the interaction of the parts created unexpected issues, consequences and even failures. In fact, many projects are thrown offtrack by late integration challenges, which can be hellish to uncover and repair. Although integration is not a feature and will not show up in a task allocation session or on a burn-down chart, prudent PMs ensure that they have allocated time in their iteration cycle to pull the separate components of their design together as they are created and ensure that they are working as a unit. Some agile teams assign a single teammate to be the integration manager, with responsibility for reviewing compo¬nents as they are completed and ensuring that they fit together.
Team Communications
While the burn-down chart can provide an at-a-glance overview of the team's progress, this is not enough to help the team stay on top of the project effort. In most agile approaches, teams use a variant of the daily meeting to track the daily issues, risks and challenges that arise. These sessions often are called "stand-up" meetings because agile proponents believe that, by standing rather than sitting around a conference table, teams are encouraged to keep these meetings short, concentrated and effective, which helps to avoid the plague of irrelevant and endless meetings that can distract from forward progress. In this "stand-up" method, the team stands together and, in round-robin fashion, answers three simple questions:
• What have you done since the last stand-up meeting?
• What will you do until the next stand-up meeting?
• What issues, risks or barriers have arisen that could distract you from accom-plishing the iteration goals?