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Team Size is Five    • submit to reddit What is the optimal size
of a team?  People have been trying to answer this question for
ages, and there seems to be little consensus. At the SPA 2009
conference this week I attended a very inspiring session by
Joseph Pelrine, who told his audience that the sizes 5, 15 and
150 have been mentioned in (or can be derived from) scientific
research, as being optimal sizes for social groups.  The agile
movement, with Scrum as the leading method at this time, often
mentions a preferred team size of 7 plus or minus 2 (which is
just a software developer’s way of saying between 5 and 9).  And
recently I read about the results of interesting new research
into optimal group size for decision making, which revealed that
anything below 20 can work well, except 8. That’s because eight
people frequently find themselves in a deadlock situation on
their decisions.   Considering all this we can easily see that
there’s only on