The Team consists of professionals who are committed to creating and sustaining any aspect of a usable, highly transparent Product Increment each Sprint. Only members of the Team create and sustain the Product Increment. Other elements in the Simplified Scrum Guide are there to support the Team in doing a great job and enabling the Heart of Simplified Scrum.
Teams are structured and empowered by the organization to organize and manage their own work. The resulting synergy optimizes the Team’s overall efficiency and effectiveness.
Teams have the following characteristics:
– They are self-managing. No one (not even the Scrum Master) tells the team how to generate high transparency on a Product Increment and do their work;
– Teams are cross-functional, with all the skills as a team necessary to create and sustain a highly transparent Product Increment;
– Individual Team members may have specialized skills and areas of focus, but accountability belongs to the Team as a whole;
– Teams share their learning and absorb related changes each day; and,
– Teams have continuous attention to technical excellence and good design which enhances agility (Agile Manifesto).
Team members are committed to the Team and its collaboration with the Product Owner and Scrum Masters. Being a Team member is a full time job, members participating in multiple Teams will prevent the entire Team from growing towards a highly effective state.
(entire chapter based on the Development Team chapter in the 2017 Scrum Guides)
Team size
The optimal Team size is small enough to remain nimble and large enough to complete significant work within a Sprint. Large Teams generate too much complexity for an empirical process to be useful. To remove complexity the Team size is minimized as much as possible taking into account the cognitive constraints of people to acquire a multitude of skills needed to get the work done. The Product Owner and Scrum Master jobs are not included within the Team. Smaller teams are preferred over larger teams, when implicit and structural teams within Team arise one should make this explicit by reducing its formal Team size. The right sized team will increase its member interdependence and the possibility of having shared mental models and increased transactive memory towards effective learning practices.
(entire chapter based on the Development Team Size chapter in the 2017 Scrum Guides)
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