DZone

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What Is a Community of Practice?

A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. Unlike a regular team, which is held together by a shared task, a community of practice is held together by the “learning value” members find in their interactions, and usually contains members of multiple existing teams.

As an example, Automation Quality Assurance engineers spread across multiple scrum teams should define their community of practice to regularly interact with each other with a goal of maintaining and improving automation best practices across teams in your organization. As counter-examples, a scrum team itself, the whole Agile Release Train, or the whole department are not communities of practice.

Source: DZone