Daily scrum of scrums

…Several teams work on the same product.

✣  ✣  ✣

Independent teams can work very efficient, but can be isolated from the rest of the organization. We need the communication to flow between teams, effectively resolve any dependancies, and integrate. Working trunk only increases this need.

You need to coordinate multiple teams on a daily basis. The scrum of scrums:

• is the primary means of synchronizing multiple teams during sprints;
• is Ideally done on a daily basis, shortly after the individual team’s daily scrum; often, 2–3 times a week is acceptable;
• is held by qualified representatives from each development team—not necessarily the scrum master—the development team decides dependent on the subject matter;
• addresses these main questions:
  1. What have we completed since our last meeting?
  2. What will will we complete before next meeting that we know will speed us up, and how do we know we have completed it (a.k.a. How to demo?)?
  3. What impediments are in our way that we cannot tackle ourselves and need to be escalated?
  4. Will anything that we do create an impediment elsewhere (e.g. perform a large integration or fail to satisfy a dependency)?

Excel, and:

• address issues then and there, since all qualified people are present; i.e., unlike the daily scrum, do not postpone tackling the issue until after the meeting;
• track items in the scrum of scrums journal, including the escalations;
• consider maintaining a separate backlog or even story map for the scrum of scrums; and
• adopt daily clean code and aim to fix all detected bugs within the same day and do not enter the bug tracking system.

Just like the daily scrum, timebox the scrum of scrums to 15 minutes.

Therefore:

Let one or more qualified team members from each development team have a short, daily meeting.

✣  ✣  ✣

One level only—avoid a ‘Scrum of Scrums of Scrums of Scrums’.

✣  ✣  ✣

---