Scrum/Team

A scrum team is a group of 3 to 9 people (ideal size around 5-7) working together.

They work in sprints where they set their goals and then figure out by themselves how to achieve them. Team members are pigs, meaning their “bacon is on the line”. The team works cross-functionally, meaning that a team is never only dedicated to a part of the solution (e.g. designing the functionality or coding it) but it is handling a request end-to-end. So they design the solution, document it, implement it and test it.

To achieve this a team should ideally be composed of members with different skills so they complement each other and facilitate the exchange of experience. Where specialist knowledge is absent but required, the team needs to acquire it by consulting external specialists (e.g. from other teams), reading articles, books, attending courses etc. as appropriate.

Team members should have continuous insight into the work of the entire team, so they can cover for each other in case of absence – although of course they will be less productive when doing so.

The team should be collocated to allow continuous high-bandwidth (face-to-face) communication.

If you are working in a team, please see the How-to for teams for more information about how Scrum affects you and what you need to take care of.

Things to avoid

• Time-split resources that are only partially available to the team
• Remote team members
• Working on the team but being a ScrumMaster or Product owner at the same time

Involvement in the Scrum of Scrums

Each team is determining a representative that they send to the weekly Scrum-of-Scrums meetings for teams. This meeting is like a Daily scrum where each team communicates what they are working on, what they plan to do and what their Impediments are. In addition they discuss which of their work might be affecting other teams or may be interesting to them.

The representatives then communicate back to their team.