To allow you a sneek peak in the Albumprinter kitchen, hereby a description of one of the pillars of our SCRUM process: the Scrum of Scrums. We work in multiple Scrum teams which depend on each other for certain tasks. So, this means that communication is required between those teams.
The Scrum of Scrums (SOS) is a recurring meeting (currently three times a week), meant to let IT teams and interested people know what is happening and to make sure impediments between teams are acknowledged and removed. An impediment is anything that gets in the way of the implementation of a user story, either before a sprint or during a sprint.
Rules
Rules
- It’s at least attended by all team representatives and a single SOS chairman.
- It takes place at the same location and strictly the same time every day. The chairman makes sure it does. Currently, it’s 11:00 AM.
- It takes 15 minutes at most. The chairman makes sure it does.
- It’s the Scrum Master’s responsibility to send a team representative to the SOS – failing doing that for the third time in a month will be escalated to the CTO. Statistical data will be collected by the chairman. Note: if all options fail, the chairman can be your representative.
- If a representative is not there or late, he or she has to buy all SOS attendants cans of coke (or any other beverage to their liking). Statistical data will be collected by the chairman.
- Team representatives are pigs – they are committed. This means they can speak up and vote.
- The SOS is free to attend to all chickens as well. Unless asked to or explicitly permitted to, chickens cannot speak up - chickens are only involved, but not committed. In return, chickens do not have to buy cokes.
- Every team representative gets to answer the four questions:
- What has your team been doing yesterday?
- What will your team be doing today?
- Did your team experience any new impediments that you can’t remove yourself?
- Will your team be causing any new impediments for other teams?
- Representatives will only bring up impediments at the SOS that they cannot remove themselves. Their internal impediments will be mentioned if applicable, but not be put on the SOS boards. You can find internal impediments at the team-specific Scrum boards. There is no need for redundancy.
- Impediments can exist in four stages, which is why there are four boards per team:
- Open - an impediment can be submitted by any team. An impediment starts off as open. Open means that the team brought it up, but so far, it wasn’t assigned to anybody yet.
- Assigned - the impediment will be assigned to a problem owner. The problem owner is one of the other teams. By accepting the assignment of the impediment, the problem owner commits to resolve the problem. The impediment now moves to the assigned board of the problem owner.
- In progress - if the problem owner will be really working on resolving this particular impediment today, the impediment moves to the status in progress. In all other cases, it will still be assigned – even if it was in progress before.
- Closed - once it has been verified that an impediment has been removed, it will be set as closed in the problem owner’s column. The problem owner can only do this after the original submitter has verified whether the impediment was successfully removed.
- Every Monday before the SOS starts, all closed impediments are removed by the chairman. Statistical data will be collected by the chairman.
- Every Monday before the SOS starts, impediments that are not set to closed get a little week sticker. Impediments with three week stickers are escalated to the CTO. Statistical data will be collected by the chairman.
- Some impediments become backlog items for the problem owner as well. In that case, they are marked with a green sticker.
- Every two sprints, an SOS retrospective will be held. This meeting follows the normal Scrum retrospective pattern. Anyone may attend this meeting, but chickens may only deliver input and are not allowed to vote.
- Anyone (including chickens) can request an additional SOS retrospective. The pigs in the SOS will then vote whether they consider this necessary.
