Two Pizza Teams

If you have been following my blog, you will notice that Dilbert comics seem to jolt me into writing a new entry.  In this comic, the pointy-haired boss actually makes a wise comment when he says “Just break into whatever size groups you think make sense”.  For Agile teams, what make sense is small teams.  I like how Amazon.com refers to their teams as “two-pizza teams” meaning that the team can be fed by 2 large pizzas.  If they can eat more than 2 pizzas, then the team is too large.

Scrum guidance states that team sizes should be between 5 and 9 people and this is no co-incidence to the paper The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.  Smaller teams are more effective because people can’t remember more than 7 things at a time – team members need to know what each other is doing. There are many benefits of smaller teams so if you need to scale up a project, add more teams than making existing teams larger.  Remember to keep it to two-pizzas