Other posts on the series
- How this series started
- Questions about number of participants
- Questions about team’s attitude to collaboration
About the number of participants
- How many people should participate on a Bytesize Architecture Session ideally?
- What should be the maximum size of people attending a Bytesize Architecture Session?
For a new group of people trying out Bytesize Architecture Sessions, the maximum number of participants is somewhere between 6 and 10 people, depending on the group dynamics and experience modelling together.
If you have less people, things work just fine, I ran sessions with 3 people and it works in that it allows people to collaborate with some framework.
Other people using Bytesize Architecture Sessions have experimented with numbers of participants, and they they found it as useful with one person and groups. Link to article
Why nine or less?
A session lasts between 45 and 60 minutes:
- When there are more people is unlikely that the participants have enough time and attention span to do Alone Together well, nevermind the rest of the session.
- Hard to “known when to speak”, so many will remain silent.
- It’s hard to not talk accidentally on top of one another
I’ve experienced teams resorting to “just have some people listening in”. Don’t! It really changes how the sessions feel, they become performative.
What if you have more people?
And the answer is: it depends on the problem you are trying to solve.
If you have a complicated team collaboration, you might want to choose a pair of people from each team to try to navigate to the solution over a series of Bytesize Sessions.
If your team is bigger than that, it might be a good time to think about where are the silos and why are they there. When it comes to teams configuration, a good resource to check out is Team Topologies
If you have a bigger problem maybe you need to try other modelling techniques first and then, try some Bytesize Sessions.
Remember, team configuration is software architecture too!
PS: Thanks Jacqui Read for the suggestion to group the posts by topic.