Scrum teams need to have the skills necessary to efficiently complete tasks while maintaining product quality and productivity. It doesn’t matter if you work in a small company or a large one, it is more likely that you will reach a point where you have too many people in your team. This can be costly and cause you to lose a lot of time. If you don’t, your team might be inefficient, which can lead to the worst case scenario. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s owner and the world’s richest man, says you should follow the “two pizzas rule”. This means that you should be able feed your scrum team with at least two pizzas. However, different companies and organizations require different sizes. Therefore, in this article, we will be addressing the recommended size of the scrum team and see how your company fits into this math.Responsibilities in agile teams
Agile teams are flexible and responsive by design. Scrum teams should be results-driven, small, and lean. Experts suggest that a scrum team should be at least six people. However, it is important to remember that scrum teams have three primary responsibilities. Product owner – in most cases, this is a key stakeholder or executive. The product owner has a vision for how the product should look and how it will fit within the company’s long-term goals. This person is responsible for managing communication, notifying the team of significant developments, and implementing high-level changes as needed. They oversee processes, provide feedback and mentor junior team members. Scrum masters monitor daily functions, provide feedback, and mentor junior team members. Scrum teams often use Agile methods to combine different roles.
To improve their performance, teams use different agile practices, primarily based upon XP, extreme programming, Kanban and Scrum. To solve the problem, team members use design-thinking. Continuous integration, test first, standard, pair work and collective ownership help to keep things lean and inject operational efficiency and quality directly into the process. Teams use Kanban to visualize their work and use CFDs or cumulative flows diagrams to highlight key opportunities and bottlenecks that can be used to increase throughput. Kanban may be the primary practice for some teams. This is due to the fact that scrum and planning are not as effective for demand-based workloads. Kanban is also popular with teams that have activities that change frequently.
Some believe that smaller teams are more agile, can make faster decisions, and can move faster than larger ones. Is it better to be smaller than your larger counterparts? It all depends on the situation. All teams have their challenges, so determining the size and scope of an agile team is a complex task. However, smaller teams may be able to develop and learn faster. They can go back and repeat the process until they succeed. Even if they fail, they are able to quickly learn from their mistakes and move on. This increases team development and creates trust.