What Martin Fowler thinks about team size

@martin-fowler · 21 positions · On ppll ↗

Chief scientist at Thoughtworks and author of Refactoring, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture and Refactoring: Ruby Edition. His bliki at martinfowler.com has been the reference text on refactoring, testing and architecture for two decades.

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1 dated position, 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Martin Fowler has said — not written or endorsed by them.

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1. 7 Apr 2026

   Our readingOne person with many agents is probably not the right answer; the better bet is two-pizza teams made more effective, with pairs of humans steering the agents together.

   Their wordsMy bet is on the more effective two pizza teams. Um and it it's also some interesting, you know, feedback we're beginning to get in terms of pair programming. I mean, with pair programming, do you say pair programming is the human and the genie? Or is it two humans and and genies? Because if it's two of us, we can control the genies perhaps a little bit better.

   ↗Martin Fowler & Kent Beck: Frameworks for reinventing software, again and againyoutube.com 17th of 20 in this recording