What is the recommended size for a Development Team?

The Scrum Guide recommends that a Development Team should have between three and nine members. A team with fewer than three members may struggle with skill constraints and reduced interaction, which can lead to lower productivity. Conversely, a team with more than nine members requires too much coordination and generates excessive complexity, which is detrimental to an empirical process. This size range is considered optimal for maintaining agility, facilitating effective communication, and ensuring the team is large enough to complete a significant amount of work within a Sprint. This count excludes the Product Owner and Scrum Master unless they are also executing work from the Sprint Backlog.

A. 7 plus or minus 3 results in a range of 4 to 10, which is not the officially recommended range.
B. A minimum of 7 is incorrect; the Scrum Guide explicitly states that effective teams can be as small as 3 members.
C. 9 is only the recommended maximum size, not the single required size. The guide provides a range to allow for flexibility.

1. Schwaber

K.

& Sutherland

J. (2017). The Scrum Guide™: The Definitive Guide to Scrum: The Rules of the Game. Scrum.org. (Page 6

Section: "Development Team Size").

"Optimal Development Team size is small enough to remain nimble and large enough to complete significant work within a Sprint. Fewer than three Development Team members decrease interaction and results in smaller productivity gains... Having more than nine members requires too much coordination. Large Development Teams generate too much complexity for an empirical process to be useful."

2. Verwijs

C.

& Russo

D. (2022). A Theory of Scrum Team Effectiveness. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Agile Software Development (XP 2022). Association for Computing Machinery. (Page 100

Section 3.2). https://doi.org/10.1145/3533716.3533730

This academic paper discusses team size as a structural factor for effectiveness

referencing the Scrum Guide's recommendation: "The Scrum Guide (2017) recommends a size of 3 to 9 developers."