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Question on team size (developers) on distributed scrum teams

Last post 08:13 pm July 13, 2016 by Alan Larimer
1 reply
Raphael Keller
08:41 am July 11, 2016

Hey guys!

This is my first post here so first something about me:
I am a 31 year old developer from Switzerland working in the software business (java/c#) for around half of my life now. For a couple years now in agile teams and i really like the way how we progressed with scrum.

My company has about 14 scrum teams and in my department we are currently 3 scrum teams but we are doing another team split now, because the 3 teams got too big (all of them have 5-6 developers besides the other regular scrum roles). the new team is going to have 2 locations - one in switzerland, the other in germany.

the location in germany has 3 developers, they're all (very good) senior developers but also very new to the company, so they need guidance and support in the beginning. the 3 developers are fixed. so we are discussing how many developers should be in the swiss part of the team.

My PO and Scrum Master would like to have 2 developers in the swiss location of the team - because of the total size of 5 developers. BUT because of the special situation (distributed, new developers) we - the developers - like to have also 3 developers in the swiss part of the team. would make 6 developers - which is a lot, we know. but we also like to interact and discuss personally (not only over skype) and are a little bit afraid that only 2 developers per team/location are not enough.

do you have any experience and/or advice on this topic?

thank you very much! raphi

Alan Larimer
08:13 pm July 13, 2016

Think about the benefits and risks of different approaches. Would initially organizing in order to on board the new developers then reorganizing later make sense? Face-to-face communication is often more beneficial, but it might be fruitful to try options such as Skype before dismissing them. A two person Development Team is small and is not disallowed, the real question is can it be cross-functional enough to meet the definition of Done? Inspect and adapt. Don't be afraid to try and learn from the experience.

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