Five agile teams planned a release together. Midway through, each team reported on-track progress, but when their work was integrated at product level many integration issues emerged. The release progress declined and the committed content now looks unachievable. What should you have done differently?

The core issue is late discovery of integration problems. Frequent and continuous integration (CI) is a fundamental agile practice that ensures small, incremental pieces of work are integrated and tested together often. This approach allows for early detection of integration issues, making them easier and cheaper to fix, and provides continuous feedback on the overall product health. While a Scrum of Scrums helps with impediment removal and coordination, it doesn't directly address the technical integration of code. Forming a separate QA team at the end of every sprint would likely create a bottleneck and delay feedback, contradicting agile principles of integrated teams and continuous testing. An online session on integration concepts might educate, but it doesn't enforce the practical application of continuous integration.