LargeDevelopmentTeam

GrahamWright describes a large development team using C++ at workshare.

I'd would be interested in hearing more about how that works. I've grown the team to 9 people now, but the amount of work coming in may benefit from a larger team (We're only just keeping pace with the growth of the story board). However I'm not sure I want to grow the team much more, as this os the largest team I've coached so far. -- OliBye

Could we split into two teams with two coaches?

One other tactic that springs to mind is Ward's petition the king play, where you send all the stories back to their authors and get them to turn up with only the most important ones.

The problem with that approach is that while it's all very XP to say "only bring the most important stories", you will lose the support of the customer if you tell them that they can't have what they want because you can't / won't grow your team past 9 people. They would either go somewhere that does have more people, or in the case of an internal customer (like my situation) would pressurise management to adopt a methodology that didn't appear to be so constrained by team size. I think we XP advocates have to get better at breaking larger teams into smaller units by delegating some of the coaching responsibility. -- MattStephenson

Well it looks like they may have gone for the two team option. Now the fun bit is that they want that team to be in Singapore. So there may be an XtC on boat quay soon ;-) --OliBye

JuttaEckstein? has a *lot* of experience scaling up agile processes for larger teams, and I'm very impressed with her work and her ideas. She's writing a book about this now. YOu can find out more about it at her web site, http://www.jeckstein.com. - JosephPelrine