I was talking to someone yesterday telling me about her previous employer and the scrum team they had.  I almost fell over when she said they had 50 people on their team at the time.  Surely that was 6 or 7 smaller teams right? No – just one team.

In fact there were so many people at the daily stand up that they used to pass around a microphone so everyone could hear!  However, things weren’t quite as bad as I might think because of pair programming.  Only one person in two actually had to talk because the second person in each pair would’ve just said the same as the first.  What about rotating pairs during the day? And even then, 25 people in a team is too large.  At that size it’s not a team anymore – it’s just a crowd.

Remember, it’s 7 plus or minus 2 for the ideal scrum team size.  Not 50!