Mixed little Teams - Scrum feasible?

Question

We are a team of 30 people, consisting of business managers, developers and software testers. Our developers are on different projects that have partially different - partially the same products. They help each other where ever they can. As we are all in the same room this is quite easy.

Now I asked why we do not use Scrum.

One answer I got is: Because we are all in the same room and we are helping each other. This goes quite quick and so we might not need scrum. Some of our products are developed only by 2 people. So this would be kind of weird to have a standup meeting with only two of us. Also our colleagues come to work at different times and some are doing home office sometimes.

Is it true that in such a setting Scrum is not feasible or does not bring any value to the company?

Hope for your comments, ideas, thoughts...

Best, Marc

Answer 1

As literature states (see here) ideal Teamsize is between 4-8. Smaller Teams should use XP.

My persional Opinion is, yes do scrum, even if you are a single developer!

Scrum is about your customer and team and about the way how they communicate. You always talk about your team. But even more is important how is the communication with the "customer/stakeholder", how is the project management done. If you have a customer involved than have a look at these processes if they are also that good as within your dev team. Most of the problems of softwaredevelopment lay here (requirements specifiction, customer expectations, being in budget/time...)

Some aspects you loose not using scrum (and therefore I would suggest using scrum even in a team of 2). You also have to not pick everything but only theparts you like

• Backlog (what is planned in the next x weeks) and its documented!
• Burndown Chart (where are we standing at the moment)
• Continouus improvements (in Scrum you capture impediments, you reflect what was good and bad..)
• Daily Scrum (makes even sense for a single person reflecting what I did and do the next day! and what problems happened.)
• Most other apsects of scrum...

I am currently starting to implement/use all this for me as a single person/developer and I can only say it makes my work and me better as a programmer. And I am even saying this, being my own customer and PO (I develop my own products/business for me)! And even than it makes sense. The advantage is, that this is with scrum all extremely lightweight (no overhead).

Answer 2

The Scrum Guide suggests a team size of 3-9 people.

There is a reason for the lower limit. Teams smaller than 3 people have less interaction and may lack the skills to deliver a potentially releasable increment in a sprint. It can be a challenge to keep the Product Owner engaged when you have a very small team.

My personal experience is that 4 people is a more realistic lower limit due to the impact of holidays and other absences on a team.

It is also important that a Scrum team is consistent over time. One of the benefits of the Scrum approach is it lets us calculate the capacity of the team and this is complicated by frequently changing team members.

Team members working from home and having different core hours should not be a major problem when working with Scrum. This is common in a lot of Scrum teams and can be mitigated with careful synchronisation and the use of technologies such as messaging applications and voice/video conferencing.