One of the principle practices in Scrum (and in fact most, if not all, agile methods) is the use of “cross-functional” teams. Somewhat surprisingly, there is often resistance at the team level to creating these cross-functional teams, but sometimes this is a result of misunderstanding what we mean when we say that a team is cross-functional.
Why Are Scrum Teams Supposed to Be Small?
One of the things we advocate in Scrum (and really most agile proponents do as well) is small cross-functional teams. I discussed what we meant by cross-functional and some of the reasons why in a previous entry. Now I’d like to look at why we recommend small teams.