Scrum Of Scrums

History:

Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, two inventor of scrum framework, first followed it in 1996.

Both of them need to coordinate on business units with multiple product lines for each business unit and coordinate with different teams each other.

Hence, they had introduced/follow new way to scale this team to complete the goal.

From then, Scrum of scrums became popular and practice closely on scaled agile.

 What is Scrum of scrums?

A method provide a means to connect multiple teams who have to work in collaboration to deliver multifaceted solutions.

With the help of transparency, review and adaption, this method helps to develop and deliver the customer expectation.

This will also support by adding value when there are scrum teams who has high-performance.

Purpose:

Teams who follow this approach not only coordinate keeping delivery as a goal, but they also ensure a fully integrated product at the end of every sprint. With this scrum of scrum acts as release team that provides artefacts, which add value to the customers.

 What should be the team size?

Team size is much critical to maintain trust and focus on common goal, as per the research from Hackman and Vidmar; it is good to have 4.6 people.

Actually when the team size is too small or large, team might struggle with the delivery of complex products.

 When is the need of scrum of scrum arise?

In case of larger team, communication may be challenging on creating trust and reach common goal.

Consequently, if there is a larger team it has to split into two or three smaller team, with this we can develop personal relationship and maintain to focus on common goal

Be careful when splitting the teams, you have a balanced skill concentration and watch out the work assignments and priorities in order to meet the delivery deadline.

While forming multiple teams to reach a common goal. Then the need of scrum of scrum produce.

 What is a common organization practice to follow Scrum of Scrums?

• To scale agile
• Manage delivery and
• Meet the deadline for larger and complex products

Following be the approach it is followed in most of the organizations

How to form the SoS?

Follow same scrum principles in the scrum of scrum teams, to deliver complete integrated and potentially shippable product at the every sprint end.

In addition to this, we also require architects and quality assurance leaders to fulfill this team.

For example:

• Chief product owner is the one who is responsible in guiding to reach primary product vision. It is not required to have a dedicated person for this, It is again the same responsibility as a product owner,
• Scrum of scrum master is the one who is responsible on concentrating process and impediment backlogs visible to other teams, prioritizing or removal of impediments and continuous improvement.

Again, here scaled daily scrum meeting happens for aligning, improve and tackle impediments. A representative from each team has to come up with the points to discuss team impediments, risks on achieving the sprint goal, dependencies on other teams followed by continuous improvements.

 Final take away:

A Key approach to scale scrum is Scrum of Scrums (SoS).

Prerequisite for scaling scrums is to have good team alignment and provide enough time to grow throughout their phases (Refer: Tuckman’s development model). Suggested to follow below principles once the scrum teams are ready.

1. Scaled daily scrum meeting to 15 min.
2. Conduct scaled daily scrum after last team daily scrum
3. Agree the decision taken in scrum of scrum
4. Follow what is the definition of done.
5. Have the complete agenda to keep SoS focused
6. Track and visualize number of days of every scrum
7. Focus towards delivery stories which has dependency