What happens if a Scrum team becomes too large?

​According to the Scrum guide, Scrum teams typically have 10 or fewer people, including Developers, Scrum Master and Product Owner. But what happens with a Scrum team that includes more than 10 people? What if the Scrum team has 10, 15 even more people?

First, the events become too long.

Scrum events can become unwieldy if there are too many people on the Scrum team.

All of the events in Scrum are time boxed, which means that they should not exceed a certain amount of time. The Sprint Planning event, for example, is time boxed at 8 hours for a one-month Sprint. For Sprints with a shorter duration, the Sprint Planning event is usually shorter.

Most Scrum teams rarely come close to exceeding the time boxes for the Sprint Planning, Sprint Review or Sprint Retrospective events. However, the larger the team, the longer all of the events take.

For example, the only eight-hour Sprint Planning that I have ever been to was for a team that had almost 20 people in it. Why? Because the more people there are in the Scrum team, the more people there are who need to coordinate together. Each Developer on the team needs to discuss their approach for the upcoming Sprint, and each person needs to understand how the work of all of the others impacts their own approach to product delivery. With so many people working closely together, coordination activities in the Sprint Planning event can quickly become a nightmare. As a result, the duration of all of the events in Scrum becomes longer and longer as the team tries to deal with the extra coordination needs of a larger team.

Some people check out

Scrum team members become disengaged

As a result of the longer meetings required to handle coordination activities for a larger team, team members may start to “check out”, meaning simply that their mind wanders and they are not engaging fully in the discussion. Other team members may accept a sub-optimal approach simply to limit the duration of the meeting.

This lack of engagement diminishes the power of each of these events in Scrum. The power of the Scrum team comes from the ability of a small, cross-functional team to collaborate together to achieve goals, but when that team becomes disengaged, the benefits that the larger organization and its stakeholders receive from the Scrum team are sharply diminished.

Cliques are formed

Subgroups can form in the Scrum team if the Scrum team is too large.

In an attempt to improve coordination, some teams will develop sub-groups within the larger Scrum team. These cliques may consist of a smaller group of developers who are collaborating together to deliver value within the Scrum team. Communication among the clique may be good and the cliques may be able to deliver value; but the rest of the Scrum team suffers. Those who are not part of the clique have decreased transparency to decisions that are being made and approaches which are being used. They may suffer lower morale as a result of feeling excluded. They may even have dependencies on members of the clique, but may suffer from unnecessary delays as a result of the decreased transparency and communication across all team members.

The team “boss”