Bubble Roles

Engineering Leader

The Engineering Leader brings a strategic lens. They own the intent, judgment, architecture, and are responsible for the Execution Plan. They are primary owners of the Forming and Storming stages.

Skilled Engineer

The Skilled Engineer brings Engineering process and operational knowledge and are responsible for the Production Plan. They are primary owners of the Norming stage, and the handover to their delivery team in the Performing stage.

The stage lead flips the RACI model, so where the Engineering Leader starts out Responsible, then end up Consulted. The Skilled Engineer starts out Consulted and ends up Responsible. There’s a part in the middle where both are Responsible at the same time - it’s up to the pair to decide when to transfer to responsibility.1

Selecting a Skilled Engineer

When a new bubble is ready to be formed, the governance team should assess available Skilled Engineers from the volunteer register. There may be one candidate more suitable than the rest because of their domain experience. Recency should also be a factor, giving opportunity to a Skilled Engineer that has been on the bench for the longest.

This selection requires consultation with the Agile Delivery Lead or Traffic Manager, who can advise on timings of the secondment, to minimise impact on the delivery team itself. Secondment should be limited to one Skilled Engineer from any one team at any time, and be respectful of the current delivery team sprint in flight.2

Secondment

Three things come back when the Skilled Engineer returns:

  1. Agentic literacy
  2. Business / Operational knowledge
  3. Application ownership

The Skilled Engineer should knowledge transfer on 2 and 3 ahead of the go-live, but 1 should be incorporated into the next team retro - intentional seeding, not accidental knowledge sharing.

Competing Priorities

If an engineer is expected to complete a certain percentage of project work (Change The Business) vs maintenance (Run The Business), they may be able to leverage that maintenance percentage for their role in the bubble.

However, the ability to context switch is individualistic, as is restraining the urge to over commit. Care should be taken that their project work does not start to suffer due to the appeal of a faster moving Frontier Development initiative.

Delivery Team Handover

At some stage after bubble selection and the Skilled Engineer confirming understanding of the intent and output, there is a feedback loop from the Skilled Engineer to their delivery team. This first checkpoint can happen any time during Storming, but must be done before Norming.

A second feedback loop checkpoint from the Skilled Engineer to their delivery team can happen any time during Norming, but must be done before Performing. Both checkpoints are essential, but can be done at any point before their deadline.

The purpose of the feedback loop is so that the team that owns the work understands what they are due to inherit. This is not for delivery teams to:

Without Frontier Development, this work would likely have never been picked up, and this work is likely only partially related to the domains that this team owns.

  1. Staff and Principal Engineers should not have operational ownership i.e. they should not be regular contributors to a delivery team’s code base or be on any on-call roster. As a result, they cannot be assigned to a Skilled Engineer role. If the governance team is too large, due to a large number of appointed senior engineering leaders, they should consider appointment base on merit. ↩︎

  2. If the Skilled Engineer has already been assigned work in the sprint, then this ceremony must be respected. ↩︎