Building Your Scrum Team

A scrum team is a self-organizing, cross-functional group of people working together to achieve a goal. The team comes together to do work and solve problems. They are not reliant on others to direct them, and they keep each other accountable.

The size of scrum team varies from group to group. Somewhere between 3 and 9 people is generally considered ideal. (This number does not include the product owner and scrum master that we will be discussing in the next section.) You need enough people on the team with the expertise that is required to complete tasks on time each sprint. However, you do not want so many people that you lose your ability to change direction quickly. Large teams often come with a large amount of overhead and increase the risk of scheduling issues.

Scrum teams are (or should be) high functioning. They align with the “performing” stage of Bruce Tuckman’s forming-storming-norming-performing model of group development in which teams perform well with little oversight. This is the ideal in Tuckman’s model as well as in an Agile development environment.

However, if you are building a scrum team from scratch, you will likely have to go through all of the group developments stages before you get to the performing stage. As defined by Tuckman’s model, the phases of group development are:

To move quickly through the stages of group development, the team must understand the roles that are part of a Scrum team and agree upon rules that facilitate interactions among team members. These topics are covered in the next few sections.