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Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

I've experienced the office of about 6 people (mentioned in a post on Epic Games) as an ideal environment for software development, better than cube farms or single person offices.

Maybe instead of struggling to apply management concepts to the development process, companies would achieve more by breaking things up into 6-person sized teams.

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I've always considered 5 the max, because each person tracks four [1] others.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2864034/#!po=1....

This reminds me of Amazon's beloved 'two pizza team' idea.

https://zurb.com/word/two-pizza-team

Hopefully that is family-sized pizzas.

> Maybe instead of struggling to apply management concepts to the development process, companies would achieve more by breaking things up into 6-person sized teams.

How do you coordinate the six person teams, prevent them from ending up in contention, etc.?

The Amazon model to addressing this problem is to minimize to the greatest extent possible both team size and inter-team communication. The ideal team is characterized by 5-8 engineers who collectively design, build, test, deploy, and own in production a service exposed to the rest of the company only through API calls over the network. This mostly addresses the coordination problem because teams shouldn't need to coordinate, and it mostly addresses the contention problem because almost every decision is entirely owned within a particular team with no expectation that they consider external input.

user stories and delegation

Ah, the innocence that thinks that is enough.

The title is minimal :)

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