Saturday, April 10, 2010

SCRUM of SCRUMs meeting questions

While reading Succeeding with Agile, I rather enjoyed Chapter 17 which was on scaling SCRUM. Here's a brief explanation of what was covered.

When coordinating work among several SCRUM teams, it is beneficial to hold SCRUM of SCRUMs meetings. These meetings differ from standard daily SCRUMs in that they are not timeblocked to 15 minutes. They allow groups of teams to discuss issues that pertain and focus on areas of overlap and integration. Such issues can, if not regularly settled, compound and critically hamper production.

When selecting who should attend from each team, it's best to choose a technical contributor (programmer, tester, designer) rather than the Product Owner or ScrumMaster. Your attendee can vary from meeting to meeting. Select the attending member based on who is best suited and knowledgeable about the state of the current sprint. The goal of the meeting is, as was previously mentioned, to remove barriers and efficiently sooth issues that arise from cross-team-dependencies.

Mike Cohn describes the differences of SCRUM of SCRUMs and daily SCRUMs as:

- They do not need to be held daily
- The do not need to be timeboxed to 15 minutes
- The are problem-solving meetings

Hosting a SCRUM of SCRUMs meeting

First off, you should only host 2 to 3 meetings a week. If you find that you need more, then you should analyze your sprint planning process.

Meetings should allow for each attending member to have 15 minutes to go over the following three questions:

1) What has my team done since we last met that could affect other teams?
2) What will my team do before we meet again that could affect other teams?
3) What problems is my team having with which it could use help from other teams?

After each member has had the floor, the focus should switch to any pending issues on the issues backlog.

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