Preference in using Agile Development with Larger Team Size

Abstract

Agile software development includes a group of software development methodologies based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between cross-functional self-organizing teams. Different software houses were visited in a developing country to determine the experiences faced by people working on a real world projects using Agile software development methodology following different variants in different team sizes to determine the preference of using Agile software development methodology in larger team sizes. Several people were surveyed out of which few responded with an opinion of not to use agile development in a team sizes exceeding 25 members. According to the experience of people the ideal team size was 5 to maximum 10. Because according to the survey increase in the number of individuals create issues of communication as it is not possible to keep everyone on the same track with larger teams especially in case of scrum meetings which usually held on daily basis, taking responsibilities as everyone becomes reluctant in taking responsibilities believing someone else will take it, sub teams because the more the number of individuals the more will be the sub teams which indirectly increases the dependency among the teams by breaking the tasks into much smaller chunks. The findings also suggest that customer feedback would increase if the team size is less than 25 which in turn says that the Quality of Software is increased. As this study had only focused on the software companies of a developing country it is recommended that further studies should be carried out by surveying the people of other different developed countries.