During one of the "Discuss Agile" meetup's I had the opportunity of presenting the approach I had taken to implement Scrum of Scrums (A.K.A SOS)

1. Scaled Scrum
Deepak T Gururaja
CSP, CSM

2. Agenda
 Scaling Scrum
 What, When and How
 Sharing of Best Practices

3. Before we begin
 What is the recommended team size in
Scrum
 What if there is a need to scale to a larger
number
 If it’s a single large team - administrative
issues creep up

4. Team of Teams a.k.a SOS
 Scrum of Scrums
 More than one team working on
delivering the same product
 Each team have Scrum roles within
 Each team is responsible for one unit of
the product

5. When should you use it
 Typically with 2 or more Scrum teams
 Teams working on the same backlog
 Co-located or distributed teams
 Total size typically less than 50
 Fairly complex project/product
 Companies that cannot afford to use the
SAFe framework

6. Lets look more closely
PSI
Integrate

7. Sprint Fundamentals
 Sprint Planning
 Dependencies
 Prioritization
 Estimation
 Plan with dependencies in sight
 Standup calls
 At a Team
 SOS

8. Sprint Fundamentals
 Reviews
 Team – Do you see a value add?
 For the user story/product
 Retrospectives
 For the team
 For the product
 For the release

9. Scrum Fundamentals
 Sprint backlog
 For the team
 Burndown
 Team
 Product
 Task Board
 Team
 Product – User story completion
 Metrics
 For the team
 For the product

10. Drawing the line
 Horizontal slicing v/s vertical slicing
 Separation at module
 Separation at feature set
 Separation at plugins
 Who do you think are the best people to
figure out where to draw the line?

11. So, how to you collaborate
 Sync up call – SOS
 Gives a pulse of the product as a whole
 Typically conducted once or twice a
week for a duration of 15 minutes and
treated like a standup call
 If there is a need for further
elaboration/discussion, talk offline
 Mandate presence from all teams

12. The Scrum Of Scrum

13. Ok… what do you discuss?
 What did the team do between the last
meeting and now?
 What will the team do between now and
the next meeting?
 Is there anything that is getting in the way
of your team?
 Are you going to work on anything that
will impact other teams?

14. Who should attend the SOS
 Scrum Masters
 Team members representing the
technical area
 Product management, if the need be
 Product managers
 Stakeholders are not typically a part of
the SOS

15. Best practices
 Plan together – deliver together
 Same length iterations
 Better to have same product owner or
someone who can take responsibility of
the product release
 Work off the same product backlog
 Backlog grooming to identify
dependencies
 Shared product Vision
 Visual flow at the product level

16. What about Our practices?
 DOD?
 For the user story
 Not for the team, but for the product
 DOR?
 Dependencies considered?
 For the user stories, not for the team
 Workflow
 Independent to the team

17. What about Engineering
practices?
 Donot forget the basics – Clean code, unit
testing, code reviews, etc
 Continuous integration eliminates risk to a
large extent
 Have regular technical checkpoints
 Always work off the same code base
 Think about weather or not you want to keep
the “master” clean
 Setting stringent coding standards brings
more benefits than you can imagine

18. Pros
 Light weight
 Easy to implement
 Does not require sophisticated structure
 Is not intensive
 No patents or certifications yet

19. Cons
 Structure not defined
 Cannot be scalable beyond a certain
number of teams
 No definite methods defined
 No dedicated roles

20. Think about….