[teampractices] Scrum of scrums

[Bryan Davis]

> Ultimately, I think this can be boiled down to: tactical dependency
> management between teams with a byproduct of increased communication and
> on-the-ground transparency between teams.

Well stated Arthur.

> 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.

There are many techniques for managing cross-team strategic planning,
but I agree that SoS is not one of them.

> I propose the following:
> * twice-weekly SoS (maybe Tu/Th)

Why so often? If this activity is primarily for interfacing Scrum
teams with each other and their consultants, shouldn't meeting once or
possibly twice per sprint suffice? If teams are executing tactically
against their sprint plans it doesn't seem that there should be a need
for 4 inter-team checkpoints per sprint (assuming 2 week sprints).

> * Any conversation out of scope is handled appropriately by facilitator
> (scrum of scrums master?)

In my experience the team will need to appoint a scrum master for this
meeting. It's too easy to decide to "solve this now" and waste the
time of the majority of participants as 2 teams hash out a blocker.

> * Keep the meeting open to chickens[0], but only allow them to actively
> participate in the conversation as needed

This is another important reason for a scrum master in this group.
Part of their service to the team is to keep this a tactical meeting
rather than yet another strategic status reporting venue.

> And of course, I suggest this as a starting point; it ought to adjust as
> necessary.

I would suggest choosing a frequency for scrum of scrums retrospective
meetings from the start. At least once per quarter would be reasonable
and you may want to do them more frequently (fortnightly, monthly?)
when initially testing the process. Hopefully you can get away with a
small timebox (30-45m) for this. Be mindful of meeting fatigue and
seek to assign issue resolution as an out-of-band task for a small ad
hoc working group who will report back to the group.

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