[teampractices] Scrum of scrums

[Arthur Richards]

I think this is a *really* good idea and something that I've discussed
informally with a handful of folks over the last year or so. In fact, we
did this on a smaller scale for fundraising during the 2010 fundraiser -
delegates from the various teams working on fundraising (engineering,
creative, community/banner implementers) met 3x/week to make sure we were
staying in sync and aligned on priorities. I think it saved us - at the
very least it saved some of our sanity.

For engineering more broadly, I think it would be enormously valuable to
have a high-bandwidth, high-throughput touchpoint across the various teams,
and this could serve really well to help us collaborate more/stay better
aligned. I think 'scrum of scrums' was originally intended to syncrhonize
work for one product with multiple projects/teams (a la fundraising),
whereas in engineering we are many products and many teams that
overlap/impact one another. As such, I'm not sure we necessarily need to
meet super frequently - but I think that is something that could be easily
tuned; perhaps we could start with 2-3x/week and see how it goes.

That said, one concern I have internally is that not all of the teams in
Engineering are structured in similar ways and more importantly are not
necessarily working in as flexible a way as others. I think the success of
something like a 'scrum of scrums' is dependent on participating teams'
ability to respond to change fairly quickly. I suppose this could serve as
a tool to motivate other teams to adopt practices/mentalities to support
this, but I'm not sure what kind of buy-in we'd be able to achieve
engineering-wide.


On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 1:47 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:

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