A component team is a team that is specialized to work on a single part of a larger system.
A common scenario would be a website that has back-end code that runs on the server and front-end code that runs in the web browser. The back-end might be coded in Java and the front-end might be coded in HTML and Javascript. One component team, staffed by Java developers, might do all work on the back-end. Another component team, staffed with HTML and Javascript developers, would do all work on the front-end.
An advantage of component teams, compared to feature teams, is that it is easier to maintain consistent architectural and coding standards in each part of the system, since only one team works on each component. A disadvantage is that most customer-facing features will require work from multiple component teams in order for the overall feature to be completed. Thus, organizations with component teams tend to have more cross-team dependencies than those with feature teams.
