How to Organize Scrum Teams
Division by functional area and the relation with microservices
What Scrum suggests
Products vary in complexity. Managing them may require groups of 2–3 to over 100 people. The Scrum guide suggests to have teams composed from 3 to 9 members; The Product Owner and Scrum Master should not be counted in the group size unless they implement the backlog items themselves. As the complexity of the product starts to increase and the number of people involved in development begins to grow, there is a need to make decisions about how to divide groups.
Division by business initiative
Some Agile coaches suggest dividing the teams by business initiative. It means that for each initiative sponsored by the portfolio management is formed a team that is in charge of the initiative. The main reason for proposing this kind of organization is that the team has all the needed competencies to complete the initiative. A Business initiative can be any new requirement or improvement to be added to the product, for example:
- Integration with a new external system
- Software architecture change to improve performances
- Creation of an analytics platform
