Have you ever wondered if you could scale the Scrum practices from individual teams to the enterprise level? Enter Scrum of Scrums.
Scrum has become the stepping stone for team agility. It is an agile framework that various teams have successfully implemented in companies from different industries across the globe to develop complex products. But it is implemented at the team level.
Scaling is not just about increasing the team size and other numbers. When you scale a methodology at the enterprise level, it requires a different approach. This requirement led to the development of Scrum of Scrums.
Continue reading to learn all about Scrum of Scrums.
Table of Contents
What is the Scrum of Scrums or SoS in Agile development?
Scrum of Scrums, SoS for short, is a scaled Agile technique that allows multiple Scrum teams to work together. The teams can be the sub-teams (5-10 people) of a larger group (more than 12 people) or multiple scrum teams working on a single project.
While an individual agile team will have their daily scrum meetings, you can collaborate with other teams by designating an ambassador or delegate who would interact with representatives from other scrum teams. These meetings are usually held twice or thrice a week instead of daily standups.
Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, the pioneers and creators of Scrum, developed Scrum of Scrums. They implemented Scrum of Scrums in 1996 at IDX Systems, now GE Healthcare, by coordinating eight business units with multiple products lines and synchronizing the individual teams. Sutherland summarised his experiences in the 2001 article – Agile can Scale: Inventing and Reinventing SCRUM in Five Companies where he introduced this concept.
In his article, this is how Jeff Sutherland defines Scrum of Scrums:
“The Scrum of Scrums as I have used it is responsible for delivering the working software of all teams to the Definition of Done at the end of the Sprint, or for releases during the sprint.”
Jeff Sutherland
Who attends Scrum of scrums?
Like you have a daily meeting in a development team to discuss the day’s plan, you have a Scrum of Scrum meeting. But instead of a daily Scrum meeting, the ambassadors meet twice a week to keep track of the project. But how are these ambassadors selected?
As you already know, a Scrum team has three roles: a Scrum Master, a Product Owner, and the other developers. You might naturally assume that it’s the Scrum master who gets to be the ambassador. It is common for the Scrum masters to attend as they are the ones who lead the daily standups and know most of the details of the progress. But it can be anybody from the team.
The selection of the ambassador depends on the theme and the context. It can be the scrum master, manager, technical expert, or even the product owner. Depending on the central point of discussion of the meeting, a team can send more than one person, for example, the scrum master and a developer. But it is important not to overload the meeting and keep it under nine attendees.
Also, there is no set rule that all SoS meetings should have the same representatives. Each development team can rotate the ambassadors depending on the development stage.
Who facilitates Scrum of Scrums?
You have a Scrum Master to lead and facilitate the daily scrum meetings. But what about Scrum of Scrums? Again, like the ambassadors, you don’t have any set rules here either.
If the number of participants in your Scrum of Scrums is relatively smaller, you can self-organize and do away with the position. Or you can choose a facilitator among the ambassadors and rotate them for every sprint. In large and distributed environments, it is better to have an official facilitator, like a Scrum of Scrums Master. Sometimes this role is also filled by the Chief Product Owner.
What are the two purposes of the Scrum of Scrums meeting?
Now that you know who attends Scrum of Scrum meetings, let’s move on to the purposes of these meetings. They mainly have two:
Ensure coordination between the teams
When you have multiple teams working on a single large project, the communication channels get reduced. Individual Scrum team members keep themselves updated with their daily meetings while the ambassadors update these progress with other ambassadors during SoS meetings. And these meetings are not just limited to reporting each other on their progress. It involves discussing the next steps so that no team ends up impeding another.
Integrate the outputs from various teams
When multiple teams work on a single project, they have a common Sprint Goal, even though their tasks differ. The frequent meetings help the teams seamlessly integrate the work towards the output and deliverables. In addition, the sessions allow you to foresee the impediments, address the bottlenecks, and provide a clear path for the teams to move forward.
How to run a scrum of scrums?
Let’s now understand how to run Scrum of Scrums. There is a timebox of 15 minutes for these meetings, but you can extend it if the project demands it. Remember that a Scrum of Scrums is not a status meeting. All the foundational principles of a Daily Scrum are applicable to the Scrum of Scrums meeting as well.
Agenda
In every Scrum of Scrums meeting, each team representative will answer these crucial questions:
- What has your team accomplished since the last time we met?
- What will your team do before the next meeting?
- Is your group having any obstacles or facing any problems in working towards the project goal?
- Will any of your team’s output interfere with or impede any other team’s tasks?
Frequency
There is no pre-defined number when it comes to the frequency of the meetings. It all depends on the larger team and the project. You can have them twice or thrice a week by scheduling Tuesday-Thursday or Monday-Wednesday-Friday. Some teams even have them daily for fifteen minutes, right after the individual teams’ daily scrums.
Below are some more tips on running Scrum of Scrums meetings:
- Keep the meetings brief and focused. If you are an ambassador, make sure to report your team’s output and not the names and other details of the individuals who accomplished it.
- Extend the time of a meeting to 30 minutes if you need it. Even though 15 minutes are enough to answer the main four questions by everyone, if any teams need some help with problem-solving, you might need those extra minutes.
- The meetings should never be a status report on the project to the management. Instead, they should focus on better coordination between the teams and solving impediments.
- Maintain a Scrum of Scrums backlogs to record the themes, problems, and solutions. This backlog will help keep track of the progress and help the ambassadors who are in rotation.
- If needed, hold meetings in the higher levels (Scrum of Scrums) with less frequency. Usually, this happens between the product owners.
Advantages & Disadvantages of Scrum of Scrums
By now, you have a clear idea of what Scrum of Scrums is all about. Let’s see why it is worth implementing.
Advantages
- Scaling Scrum is easier with this approach, where you divide the larger group into individual Scrum teams of 5-10 people.
- Scrum of Scrums ensures that every team related to the project stays informed and better understands the overall project development and other team’s work.
- It removes any impediments and reinforces every team’s roles and responsibilities. This reinforcement helps all the teams to stay on course and align with the common goals.
- If there are any redundancies with similar work that another team might be doing, you can detect them initially and reallocate the tasks. Such early detection will save much time for both teams.
- The meetings help to solve problems. These meetings are useful when the whole team finds it difficult to solve a problem, and an expert from the other team will help.
- Scrum of Scrums fosters better collaboration and coordination between different teams as everyone is in the loop. It facilitates information sharing through the representatives.
- It becomes easier to integrate the outputs towards the end of the project as all the teams work in coordination and remove any redundancies and impediments in advance. Such integration helps execute future sprints more effectively.
Let’s see some of the downsides of Scrum of Scrums.
Disadvantages
- Even though the meetings are very beneficial, frequent meetings often interrupt the regular work, causing you to lose your focus for some time.
- All the teams must be a Scrum team. You can’t divide traditional development teams into sub-teams and conduct these meetings.
- Scrum of Scrums is a framework with guidelines and doesn’t have any set rules for selecting representatives. If the teams are not Agile and self-organizing, they send the wrong ambassadors that would cause further problems with collaboration.
Conclusion
As you can see, Scrum of Scrums is one method to scale Scrum and is not the only way of scaling. It is simpler to understand and easier to implement. It is flexible when dividing teams, designating ambassadors, and scaling the Agile adoption across the entire organization.
Do you have any tips on conducting SoS meetings?
