[teampractices] Story wall for the Scrum of Scrums

[Arthur Richards]

On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 5:49 PM, Diederik van Liere <dvanliere at wikimedia.org
> wrote:

> Last week's Scrummaster Meetup and the brief email correspondence between
> Tomasz and Ken regarding the distinction between the Scrum of Scrums (SOS)
> and the Engineering / Operations Biweekly made me think a bit more about
> how we could run the SOS and how it might differ from the Biweekly meeting.
>
> 1) Use a dedicated story wall to run the SOS meeting. An example of such a
> wall is available at
> https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/projects/scrum_of_scrums/cards?favorite_id=1099&view=Wall[0]
>

In general, I think this is a *great* idea. Being able to visually
represent - and track - the interdependencies is enormously useful. I think
being able to refer to something like this during the scrum o' scrums will
help everyone keep the conversation well focussed and in scope.


> 2) The story wall is basically a matrix to highlight team
> inter-dependencies:
> a) each team is in it's own row
> b) each team is a possible dependency
> (so each team will appear once in a row and once in a column) -- the
> current list of teams on the wall is not yet exhaustive.
>


I have chatted a bit with Toby and Diederik about this over the last few
days. Originally, I thought Mingle would not be a good place for this for a
handful of reasons, and that perhaps Trello would be a better approach due
to its user-friendliness, but as Diederik has shown, you can do a slick
matrix view in Mingle which makes it easier to quickly identify the
dependencies/blockers. I think this could be maintained with minimal effort.


> 3) Each scrum master, with assistance of the PM and/or other team members,
> adds their stories *which have an interdependency on another team* to the
> wall from their current sprint / next sprint / this week / next week
> (whatever makes most sense, I think this will depend per team). So you
> should not copy your entire story wall to the SoS story wall :) [1]
> The upper-left / lower-right diagonal should always be empty -- only cards
> with inter-dependencies should be discussed.
>

I think is good when interdependencies are known before hand - but that
will not always be the case. For instance in the first meeting the other
day, there was at least one touch point which I think was previously
unknown that was discovered during the meeting (Language/Analytics for
translation metrics). So if we proceed with this, we should stay flexible.

Also, I'm not sure we necessarily need to add full 'stories' to show
interdependencies - this will not be useful (or possibly won't even make
sense) for teams that don't work with the concept of 'stories'. We may just
create a card with just enough info to capture what's necessary to move
forward.


> 4) SOS participants are expected to have looked at the SOS wall before the
> SOS meeting.
>

This is fair, I think - but it will be even more useful if we would all
keep the wall visible during the SoS. The mobile web team does this during
our standup meetings - constantly having the board visible while discussing
our own statuses, dependencies, and blockers helps us keep the conversation
very well focussed so we stay on topic and finish quickly.


5) No cards on the wall -- no speaking time :)
>

I disagree with this point and will echo a bit of what Dan mentioned. As
mentioned previously, I think that some amount of general conversation
around what a team's been up to is worthwhile to uncover hidden
dependencies or ways in which other teams can collaborate.


My hope by making this meeting more visual it will be easier to identify
> interaction points / blockers / dependencies between the teams. This also
> means that  the success of this meeting is dependent on the preparations
> made by all participants instead of the skills of the SOS master -- that
> seems like a win as well
>

Completely agreed.

(Arthur really rocks btw).
>

Aww shucks, thanks :)


> Another benefit of visualizing the meeting is that non-participants can
> get fairly quickly an understanding of what has been discussed and where
> the bottlenecks are -- a nice feature for our managers ;). Finally, using a
> visual approach we can more clearly differentiate this meeting from the
> Engineering / Operations Biweekly meeting.
>

+1

I'm very curious to hear if anyone else has any thoughts. Unless there are
strong opinions against this, we can prepare cards any cards necessary from
the notes of the first SoS and try using this with the next one on Tuesday.


-- 
Arthur Richards
Software Engineer, Mobile
[[User:Awjrichards]]
IRC: awjr
+1-415-839-6885 x6687
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