<div dir="ltr">Hi Arthur -- FWIW -- I signed up to get this going (among the Engineering directors)<div><br></div><div>Want to chat briefly tomorrow about getting this going?</div><div><br></div><div>-Toby</div></div><div class="gmail_extra">
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 4:23 PM, Arthur Richards <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:arichards@wikimedia.org" target="_blank">arichards@wikimedia.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr"><div>I think we need to be clear about the issues we can and cannot address with a meeting like the SoS. There are a lot of challenges we face staying unified in engineering, and I don't think a SoS can (or should) address all of them. From my perspective, a high-frequency meeting with reps from multiple teams (like SoS) can help us achieve:</div>
<div><br></div><div>* Better inter-team communication, primarily from a tactical (as opposed to strategic) perspective</div><div>* Better coping with integration challenges</div><div>* Better dealing with dependency management across product areas</div>
<div>* Improvements around general change management across product areas</div><div>* Having a shared view into the day-to-day activities of individual teams</div><div>* A forum in which to make commitments to one another (eg we will make sure to get patchset X reviewed by Thursday in an effort to unblock your team)</div>
<div>* Identifying where further communication is needed between two or more teams</div><div><br></div><div>Ultimately, I think this can be boiled down to: <b>tactical dependency management between teams </b>with a byproduct of<b> increased communication and on-the-ground transparency</b> between teams.</div>
<div><br></div><div>For those of you practicing scrum or something scrum-ish, it's just the daily scrum but slightly bigger-picture. As such, I think this meeting would NOT be good for things like:</div><div><br></div>
<div>* Addressing prioritization</div><div>* Strategic planning</div><div>* Big-picture or multiple weeks-forward planning</div><div>* Roadmap adjustments</div><div>* Planning bigger-deal collaboration (eg Mobile Web needs a VE engineer for three weeks to accomplish XYZ)</div>
<div><br></div><div>Prioritization, big deal collaboration, long-term planning, etc should happen in a different venue. I'm not sure how much cross-team collaboration goes into this kind of stuff at the moment, but I think it's beyond the scope of the SoS.</div>
<div><br></div><div>To sum up, the scope of the SoS is fairly limited - primarily to discussing current roadblocks or immediately upcoming things (like, things coming up before the next time the SoS meets). If something comes up that's out of scope, the meeting facilitator should encourage that conversation to continue outside of the SoS. Like the daily scrum, this should not be strictly a status update - it should be a conversation, kept relevant to participants, in which commitments are made and blockers/scary issues are identified. If we can stay strict about the timebox and the scope of conversation, I have faith that a SoS will not turn into the feature team meetings of yore :)</div>
<div><br></div><div><b>I propose the following:</b></div><div>* twice-weekly SoS (maybe Tu/Th)</div><div>* one rep from each team that wants to participate (mobile web, analytics, and ops have already committed)</div><div>
* 30 minute timebox</div><div>* The following questions are addressed:</div><div>** <span style="line-height:20px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">What has your team done since we last met?</span></div>
<div><span style="line-height:20px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">** What will your team do before we meet again?</span></div><div><span style="line-height:20px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">** Is anything slowing your team down or getting in their way?</span></div>
<div><span style="line-height:20px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">** Are you about to put something in another team’s way?</span></div><div><span style="line-height:20px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">* Any conversation out of scope is handled appropriately by facilitator (scrum of scrums master?)</span></div>
<div><span style="line-height:20px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">* Notes should be taken and archived (via engineering@?)</span></div><div><font color="#333333" face="Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><span style="line-height:20px">* It is the responsibility of the team rep to disseminate appropriate information to their team/ensure commitments made during SoS are fulfilled</span></font></div>
<div><font color="#333333" face="Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><span style="line-height:20px">* Keep the meeting open to chickens[0], but only allow them to actively participate in the conversation as needed</span></font></div>
<div><font color="#333333" face="Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><span style="line-height:20px">* We start as early as next week to try it out (maybe 1 October if folks agree to Tu/Th)</span></font></div><div>
<br></div><div><font color="#333333" face="Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><span style="line-height:20px">And of course, I suggest this as a starting point; it ought to adjust as necessary. </span></font><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;line-height:20px">I think that this can be workable and valuable for all teams in engineering, even those not working scrumishly (eg ops). I feel strongly that a SoS will need active facilitation to keep to the timebox/keep the conversation within scope. We could either have a rotating facilitator (maybe each team takes turns facilitating) or we can consense on/have decided for us a dedicated facilitator - I don't much care one way or the other (I see merits to both approaches).</span></div>
<div><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;line-height:20px"><br></span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;line-height:20px">I think if we have a critical mass[1] on board, we should go for it. We've already got mobile web, ops, and analytics committed to participating in something SoS-flavored - in order to achieve critical mass, I think we need at least one more team focussed on user-facing features (eg i18n/l10n, visual editor, flow, etc) to participate.</span></div>
<div><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;line-height:20px"><br></span></div><div><font color="#333333" face="Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><span style="line-height:20px">So, thoughts on the proposal? Any other teams want to be involved in SoS?</span></font></div>
<div><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;line-height:20px"><br></span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;line-height:20px">[0] </span><font color="#333333" face="Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><span style="line-height:20px"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicken_and_the_Pig" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicken_and_the_Pig</a></span></font></div>
<div><font color="#333333" face="Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><span style="line-height:20px">[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass_(sociodynamics)" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass_(sociodynamics)</a></span></font></div>
</div><div class="gmail_extra"><div><div class="h5"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 1:35 PM, Toby Negrin <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:tnegrin@wikimedia.org" target="_blank">tnegrin@wikimedia.org</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">Could we try having a SoS with a relatively small number of attendees initially, perhaps even from only a few teams? That might help streamline the process before we roll out it to everybody. (I'm a big fan of prototyping :)<div>
<div><br></div><div>To address Amir's totally valid comments directly, I'd hope that if we make this meeting about communication and co-ordination it will be still be useful for non-scrum teams.</div></div><div><br>
</div><div>Because a lot of people will end up attending this meeting, we should a) keep it very quick and make sure that issues are discussed in depth in another forum b) keep only the next few sprints/releases in scope for pretty much the same reason.</div>
<span><font color="#888888">
<div><br></div><div>-Toby</div></font></span></div><div><div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 11:38 AM, Amir E. Aharoni <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il" target="_blank">amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="rtl"><div dir="ltr">The Language Engineering team has been trying, quite successfully, to
practice Scrum (or something similar) since its inception two years ago. I
attended ScrumMaster training last June, and most of its content was quite familiar to me, "scrum of scrums" being one of the notable
exceptions. I really liked the idea and immediately thought that it's
something that we should consider implementing. However, I have several comments about this:<br><br></div><div dir="ltr">0. As other people said already, not all the teams in the Foundation practice Scrum, and even those that do, do it quite differently, so making sure that everyone is on the same page—or rather, in the same book—will be a challenge.<br>
<br></div><div dir="ltr">1. Teams need Stuff from each other in different scopes. Some needs are immediate for the current sprint, for example: "I need somebody from Platform to review a commit, because otherwise the team won't be able to complete story #1234 in its current sprint." Some needs are less immediate, but relate to something in the Product Backlog, for example: "I need Mobile to change some things in ResourceLoader support in MobileFrontend, so that my team will be able to start working on story #2345 in one of its next sprints". Is Scrum of Scrums for both types of needs or only for one of them? Can be both, but this must be properly defined; for future sprint needs, the Product Owners must be involved, because they set the priorities for them.<br>
<br></div><div dir="ltr">2. Please, oh please, let's make sure that these meetings are not like the weekly Features team meeting in which I used to participate before Language Engineering was separated from Features. They were very long, and contained just about updates on the work, and much of them was not so relevant (I don't know how are these meetings held now, if at all). Most importantly, they must be properly time-boxed, and the participants should prepare the Needs section well: To know what are they going to ask from other teams and to emphasize properly. Scrum is about removing blockers, so this section is supposed to be the most important.<br>
</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><div><br clear="all"><div><br>--<br>Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי<br><a href="http://aharoni.wordpress.com" target="_blank">http://aharoni.wordpress.com</a><br>
“We're living in pieces,<br>
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore</div>
<br><br></div><div><div><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">2013/9/18 Erik Moeller <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:erik@wikimedia.org" target="_blank">erik@wikimedia.org</a>></span></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Hi folks,<br>
<br>
at the engineering management level we've been talking about how we<br>
can improve inter-team coordination/prioritization decisions without<br>
managers attempting to continually run interference on behalf of teams<br>
(which is a recipe for failure, IMO, because managers generally are<br>
not nearly sufficiently involved in the day-to-day workings of a<br>
team).<br>
<br>
Examples of problems that I think are worth solving:<br>
- Ensuring platform and ops are in the loop on the latest shiny<br>
features you're building<br>
- Surfacing perceived blockers ("we're still waiting on the Varnish<br>
migration til we can release X, so we've moved on to Y")<br>
- Ensuring feature developers are in the loop on new services/APIs<br>
that are being built that can be used by feature devs<br>
- Surfacing questions about prioritization ("Ops: we've been asked to<br>
work on OSM" - "Mobile: we should probably talk to the mobile PM to<br>
figure out how urgent that is")<br>
<br>
One process recommended by scrum practitioners is a scrum of scrums.<br>
The idea is that one representative of each team meets with other team<br>
reps for a daily (or 3 times/week, or whatever works) 15 minute<br>
coordination sync-up, similar to the daily stand-up but focused on<br>
inter-team issues and blockers. The process is described here:<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.scrumalliance.org/community/articles/2007/may/advice-on-conducting-the-scrum-of-scrums-meeting" target="_blank">http://www.scrumalliance.org/community/articles/2007/may/advice-on-conducting-the-scrum-of-scrums-meeting</a><br>
<br>
This particular article recommends having implementers (devs/testers)<br>
attend the scrum of scrums. Product owners, ScurmMasters and others<br>
can get involved when there's a conflict around prioritization or<br>
blockers that need to be resolved. But having implementers attend the<br>
scrum of scrums can help keep the meeting focused on technical<br>
details.<br>
<br>
In our context, this may be the kind of meeting where note-taking<br>
would be useful. For example, a daily email to engineering@ including<br>
the notes could be helpful. But that's just an idea.<br>
<br>
Thoughts on the general concept?<br>
<br>
Thanks,<br>
Erik<br>
<span><font color="#888888">--<br>
Erik Möller<br>
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation<br>
<br>
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