Having a dedicated software development team has important advantages in terms of flexibility and genuinely living the agile experience, in which the team is iteratively adding value to the product and the business. The ability to change and adjust the work in regards to business decisions is immense and all of this can be accomplished by having an agile software development that is aligned with business priorities.
Although projects do not have to be, in essence, any different than having a dedicated software development team some additional key factors must be taken care of despite having the full agile experience on the application development cycle.
Scope
A well-defined scope is important and extremely significant in either case. Counting on a dedicated software development team offers a new grade of flexibility in terms of changing the scope of the product in development. The team will adapt to the business priority and here the Product Owner is in charge of making this happen. The fixed scope project is not that divergent but additional steps are required, Change Order Request (Change Management Process artifact) for instance is necessary to state what has changed and the impact on the rest of the project.
Resources
Fixed scope projects, in reality, could be different in terms of changes of the team members, either increasing or decreasing size. Assuming that the team velocity is maintained and the goals in terms of planning, dates, and scope are accomplished then it is feasible to see team movements to maximize value among projects of related nature. This is, by way of explanation, changing members from the team and causing no impact to project goals. In contrast, with a dedicated software development team, these kinds of changes are far less common.
Time
Projects are temporary and they have a closure stage. If the product that was generated after the successful completion of the project needs to keep evolving, like a new set of features, then a new project with a new plan and scope is required. Dedicated software development teams are different in this way; the team is there to keep adding features iteration after iteration. The Product Owner defines the user stories that are going to be developed in the relevance of the business priority. This is a great advantage in ever-evolving products.
Cost
That edge cutting feature that needs to get developed and hit the market can be perfectly prioritized by the product owner in the corresponding development iteration of the software dedicated team. The fixed scope project is slightly distinct in this sense, in addition to the Change Order Request required to document the change to the scope and its impact there are probably additional costs involved.
To conclude, these were some differences in the experiences of having a dedicated software development team or an agile software development in a fixed scope project. Both being agile, there are cases in which agile teams are the perfect fit to get development products done, given the time, cost constraints or strategy. However, there are others where counting on a dedicated team offers more flexibility and adds more value to the mid-long term, especially in constantly evolving products.
