The most effective strategy for minimizing cross-team dependencies is to organize the product backlog by feature. By assigning a complete feature or a group of related epics to a single team, that team can work on a vertical slice of the application, from the user interface down to the data layer. This approach creates "feature teams" that have end-to-end ownership, significantly reducing the need for coordination and handoffs with other teams. It ensures that each team can deliver a discrete piece of business value independently, which is a core principle of Agile development and crucial for parallel work streams to succeed without creating bottlenecks or integration delays.

A. Grouping by technical difficulty does not address functional dependencies and can lead to one team needing a component built by the other, creating the very dependencies you want to avoid.

C. Allocating work based on team experience is arbitrary regarding the work's structure and fails to prevent functional dependencies between the stories assigned to different teams.

D. Allowing teams to choose stories by preference is an unstructured approach that lacks the strategic planning needed to manage and minimize dependencies in a multi-team environment.

1. Appian Documentation

Application Planning

"Writing User Stories" section: This section details the INVEST criteria for user stories (Independent

Negotiable

Valuable

Estimable

Small

Testable). The "Independent" principle is key. To maintain independence across parallel teams

work must be partitioned so that one team's stories do not block another's. Grouping by feature is the primary method to achieve this.

2. Appian Documentation

Appian Delivery Methodology

"Methodology Overview" section: This document emphasizes delivering business value iteratively. Organizing work by feature aligns directly with this goal

as each feature represents a tangible piece of business value. This structure supports team autonomy and a clear focus on delivering complete

functional increments

which is essential when multiple teams are contributing to a single application.