[teampractices] Scrum of scrums

[Erik Moeller]

Hi folks,

at the engineering management level we've been talking about how we
can improve inter-team coordination/prioritization decisions without
managers attempting to continually run interference on behalf of teams
(which is a recipe for failure, IMO, because managers generally are
not nearly sufficiently involved in the day-to-day workings of a
team).

Examples of problems that I think are worth solving:
- Ensuring platform and ops are in the loop on the latest shiny
features you're building
- Surfacing perceived blockers ("we're still waiting on the Varnish
migration til we can release X, so we've moved on to Y")
- Ensuring feature developers are in the loop on new services/APIs
that are being built that can be used by feature devs
- Surfacing questions about prioritization ("Ops: we've been asked to
work on OSM" - "Mobile: we should probably talk to the mobile PM to
figure out how urgent that is")

One process recommended by scrum practitioners is a scrum of scrums.
The idea is that one representative of each team meets with other team
reps for a daily (or 3 times/week, or whatever works) 15 minute
coordination sync-up, similar to the daily stand-up but focused on
inter-team issues and blockers. The process is described here:

http://www.scrumalliance.org/community/articles/2007/may/advice-on-conducting-the-scrum-of-scrums-meeting

This particular article recommends having implementers (devs/testers)
attend the scrum of scrums. Product owners, ScurmMasters and others
can get involved when there's a conflict around prioritization or
blockers that need to be resolved. But having implementers attend the
scrum of scrums can help keep the meeting focused on technical
details.

In our context, this may be the kind of meeting where note-taking
would be useful. For example, a daily email to engineering@ including
the notes could be helpful. But that's just an idea.

Thoughts on the general concept?

Thanks,
Erik
-- 
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation