Can Scrum be used effectively for larger than two pizza teams (7-9 people)?
David J Bland
Yes, the ScrumAlliance specifically states 7 plus or minus 2, which falls within your 7-9 number above.
Can Scrum be used effectively for larger than two pizza teams (7-9 people)?
Add comment viewed 307 times Latest activity about 1 year ago
NN comments
5 answers
Wouter Lagerweij
If you want to scale Scrum beyond that size you should consider splitting into two (or more) teams, and distributing the work between the teams.
A good discussion on how this could work can be found in the example chapter on 'Feature Teams' from Larman and Vodde's Scaling Lean and Agile Development on Craig Larman's website.
The rest of the book is also worth it, but this chapter gives a very good introduction on how to set-up scrum with multiple teams.
Aleksey Dmitriyev
In my opinion, a larger Scrum team must be more cross-functional, more disciplined, and more automated to be efficient. In other words, what may be okay in a smaller team, becomes a bigger problem in larger team, for example, if it lacks continuous integration, automated testing or etc.
Ron Jeffries
I have seen effective Agile teams as large as 30 people, but it becomes unwieldy. I have worked on a highly effective team with 14 developers and two or three product owner members, the official PO and her helpers.
I would prefer to have a team of size 10 than two teams of size 5, and would consider splitting around 12 or 14.
It's important that teams be cross-functional, that is, that they have within them all the skills necessary to complete each Sprint's work. Therefore it would be very ill-advised to split unless you were able to create two fully cross-functional teams.
Stephan Huez
I work with a team of 12 with 8 developers, one Product Owner, 1 analyst and 2 testers. Starting with a team that size was not easy because no one on the team had experience with agile. Short iterations, hence frequent retrospectives, where key to improving the process and the team.
At a certain point in time, we envisaged splitting the team in two feature teams but we dropped the idea. Things are working better now but it is very important to help the team remain disciplined. For example, some meetings could still easily drag on for way too long because of the number of team members.
A important point regarding team splitting is the willingness of the team give it a chance. In this case, team members were really reluctant to try it out.