Scrum Of Scrums

On a daily basis, a Scrum Team understands its progress towards achieving the Sprint Goal, and, if necessary, adjusts its plan to maximize the probability of achieving it. This is the purpose of the Daily Scrum. It is a daily event to Inspect and Adapt.

During the course of a sprint, the team may discover things that can impede it’s ability to achieve the Sprint Goal. These things are referred to as impediments. They may include things like:

• Unplanned interruptions (for example, a critical production bug that must be fixed).
• Unplanned reduction in team capacity/velocity (a team member goes out sick).
• An unforeseen dependency. Discovery of something that will prevent completion of a planned user story.
• Discovery of unplanned but necessary work. A story needs a database change that was not factored into the original sprint plan.
• A late bug found in user story acceptance testing causing the story to be carried into the next sprint.

The exact format of a Daily Scrum may vary from team to team, but the main talking points should be progress of items in the Sprint Backlog, and impediments to getting them done. In many cases the team may be able to resolve or mitigate or simply accept most impediments and carry on. However if the impediment is something that cannot be resolved by the team (e.g. recurring outages in a test environment), then the team should escalate for help.

At scale, where we have multiple scrum teams servicing a product backlog, we may use an equivalent event called the Scaled Daily Scrum. or simply the Scrum Of Scrums. This event serves the same basic purpose, viz, align all teams on progress towards goals, and communicate impediments or potential impediments to achieving them. Like the Daily Scrum, problem solving discussions are taken outside the meeting where they are worked on by a the appropriate set of people, or they are escalated for help.

For teams that are part of larger multi-team programs, the overall approach might look like the following. At 0800 am every day each team huddles to conduct their daily scrums. New impediments that cannot be resolved within the teams are recorded. Fifteen minutes later any impediments that need coordination with the larger program are brought into a Scrum Of Scrums, by ambassadors from each of the scrum teams. This pattern continues until at, say 0900 am, a leadership team with authority for funding and resources, reviews a backlog of the most critical impediments and takes appropriate actions to keep programs on track, or makes adjustments designed to minimize impact to business objectives.