[teampractices] Scrum of scrums

[Arthur Richards]

I'd love to see this become a reality - what teams are interested in
participating in something like this?


On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 6:26 PM, Bryan Davis <bdavis at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Hello list!
>
> Two separate people forwarded this message to me and asked me to a)
> join the list and b) provide input, so here I am.
>
>  I don't have a completely formed argument to provide on this as I am
> both new to the organization and not currently embedded in a true
> scrum team, but I'll try to provide some anecdotes from prior
> practice.
>
> > 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")
>
> These are exactly the sort of issues that led to implementing scrum of
> scrums communication at $DAYJOB-1. An additional problem that we faced
> (and I believe is faced here) was the need to interface scrum teams
> and non-scrum "consultants" within the organization. In our case,
> Operations, Accounting, Legal and Customer Services were all
> "consultant" roles the scrum teams. This means that there were not
> typically embedded representatives of these groups within the teams
> themselves.
>
> Experimentation is generally needed to determine the right mix of
> frequency, duration and attendance that produces a good level of
> communication without a burdensome amount of overhead for the
> participants. When I have employed this practice previously it was
> generally a weekly meeting with a duration of 5 minutes per team
> represented. With a large number of teams (>6) it can be very helpful
> to scale up by holding a scrum of scrums of scrums rather than
> attempting to directly interface all teams. It is also useful to form
> and disband smaller scrum of scrum teams meeting at higher frequency
> at particular project inflection points such as the last few sprints
> of a major feature release or the run up to a cutting a new shippable
> product version.
>
> This should be a meeting for pigs[0] meaning that the purpose is not
> to provide management with yet another view of the roadmap progress of
> the individual teams. The intent is to surface inter-team issues as
> early as possible before each team's individual increment is
> endangered by roadblocks.
>
> > 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.
>
> A scrum of scrums should be treated as any other scrum team. This
> means that their workings should be visible and inspectable at all
> times. There should definitely be tangible artifacts that are
> available to all members of the organization. At $DAYJOB-1 this took
> the form of a hallway whiteboard that documented the next week's
> milestones and current blockers. The scrum of scrums team was
> responsible for keeping this artifact up to date on at least a weekly
> basis. In this environment I would imagine that a wiki page would
> replace the whiteboard to be more accessible to remote staff.
>
>
> [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicken_and_the_Pig
>
> Bryan
> --
> Bryan Davis              Wikimedia Foundation    <bd808 at wikimedia.org>
> [[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]]  Sr Software Engineer                Boise, ID
> irc: bd808                                        v:415.839.6885 x6855
>
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-- 
Arthur Richards
Software Engineer, Mobile
[[User:Awjrichards]]
IRC: awjr
+1-415-839-6885 x6687
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