Starting Small and Growing

If your organization is new to Agile methods or eXtreme Programming (XP),it is a good idea to start project with the smallest team possible (as small as one pair of engineers) and add more pairs as people become comfortable with the XP processes and the support infrastructure is debugged (unit test development, continuous integration, etc.). Although it depends on the target size of the final team and the experience of the people you are adding, a good rule of thumb would be to add no more than one pair per iteration. It is good to pair up a more senior person with a more junior one. As XP novices enter the team, successful pairs should be split so an member can be paired with each of the novices.