[teampractices] Scrum of scrums

[Arthur Richards]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 5:45 PM, Bryan Davis <bd808 at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> > 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.
>

Thanks :)


> > 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 suspect that after engaging in SoS, we may want to explore how we
overlap/engage in bigger-picture strategic planning - but I think there is
a lot of value to be found quickly around day-to-day collaboration with
SoS. I have some more thoughts on this that I'll share in a separate note.


> > 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).
>

I figured twice-weekly was better than daily for us, but generally I think
you're right. I don't know if we conceivably do this as a 'once per
iteration' kind of thing since I presume we all have different sprint
durations/start and end times/etc - I don't even know if all interested
parties use strict iterations. What if we started out with once a week?



> > 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.
>

I wholeheartedly agree. A regular retrospective would help fine tune a SoS
and potentially even evaluate its overall utility/efficacy. If we're
SoS'ing weekly, perhaps once a month would be a good rhythm for a
retrospective - at least to start.

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