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Many of the developers in this community don't care that much about Agile development as a concept, because we are startup devs that prefer to work in a company
by NathanKP 12y ago
Many of the developers in this community don't care that much about Agile development as a concept, because we are startup devs that prefer to work in a company that only has 3-5 devs total and doesn't need a fancy named system to make the development cycle work.
To us, "Agile" is the organizational system that you need to build out once the company scales up to lots of devs, but by that time we are already gone, working at a new startup building new stuff in another tiny team. We don't like the organizational cruft, we just like the process of building stuff, preferably with limited management.
- UK-AL 12y agoAgile only really works for teams of 3-7. It's defiantly not a methodology for larger teams. There are things for scaled up Agile development such as SAFe, but it's really a hack.
- ferentchak 12y agoMost of the research says agile teams of 7+-2 are best. At my work we have been trying to look at the differences that team size makes in software output. SAFe is interesting because it can help show large companies understand the value to using XP practices. Crazy ideas like unit testing your code.
- jdlshore 12y agoI think you're mistaking "common wisdom" for research. A lot of people like to say 7 +/- 2, but as I understand it, that number comes from studies of short-term memory. (It's why phone numbers in the US are 7 digits.) Research of teams (not specific to Agile) puts the maximum effective size closer to 12, and the maximum size of a "tribe" around 150-200. My own experience is that 12 people works great for an agile team, with 6-8 of them being programmers. If you're not using pair programming, cut those numbers in half.
- ferentchak 12y agoYeah you are right, I asked Larry Maccherone to see if there was prior research about that common belief in the 7 person team and he was not aware of any. If you are interested in hearing about some of the current research that we are doing about team size you can check into it on this video. I am not sure he is ready to publish his work but this can give you a taste of it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Trgz2SAz0k&list=PLSRf1YEPZ7uSRlu0FVo3uqRxP-W7KH2lg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Trgz2SAz0k&list=PLSRf1YEPZ7u...
- dragonwriter 12y ago> Agile only really works for teams of 3-7. The usual rule of thumb is that "atomic" teams should be 5-9 members (often expressed as 7 plus-or-minus 2), with larger groups as teams-of-teams. Larger teams simply don't work as single teams, and there's centuries of experience supporting that in pretty much every field everywhere.
- AnimalMuppet 12y agoI once worked on an XP team of 30. It worked. We had people who specialized in some areas of the code, but we worked hard on avoiding silos.