Scrum of Scrums

Scrum of Scrums is a very natural extension of Scrum. Instead of expanding the Scrum group into a larger group; The organization maintains a physical Scrum group as a unit component and creates a link between these components through a logical Scrum team .

The illustration shows the scale of the project with 243 personnel. Instead of expanding the Scrum group to 243 members (scale out); The employees are organized into many Scrum groups with 9 members each. Each Scrum A group has 1 member participating in the Scrum team at a higher level to connect, synchronize, collaborate among groups and form Scrum of Scrums A as Scrum B ; Each member of the Scrum B team has 1 member participating in the Scrum C team at a higher level to connect, synchronize, collaborate among teams.

Scrum A teams are a standard Scrum team with members who work together and get together; I call the physical Scrum team .

Scrum B, Scrum C groups include non-fixed members; I call the logical Scrum group .

The physical Scrum team is organized as a standard Scrum team, following the roles, events, and artifact defined in the Scrum guide. The logical Scrum team is different and needs a little attention.

First, the logical Scrum team only identifies the number of members, does not define specific members. Because in the standard Scrum team, every team member knows what is happening in the team, what is being done, the difficulties encountered and the current progress. Therefore, any member of the physical Scrum team can join the logical Scrum team and provide the same information. The Scrum A team will often not assign An or Binh to be the Scrum B team member; because anyone can be imprisoned with the same effect; Rotation mode is an example. In contrast, this also helps all team members to be responsible for the overall management of the Scrum A team. The same goes for the Scrum B team.

Second, the logical Scrum team has no reason to perform all the roles and events as the standard Scrum team. The team will only perform Sprint Planning as well as Daily Scrum quickly to synchronize the work together, as well as find out which jobs are being blocked (blocked) so that the route can be changed. Handling common difficulties is still the responsibility of the physical Scrum team .

In order for Scrum of Scrums to work effectively, it is important to reduce the binding between groups. Scrum of Scrums does not limit collaboration, direct exchange among other team members; but if this happens with high frequency, the Scrum team's performance and ability to target the Goal Sprint is reduced due to too many constraints. This is easy to say, but in a large system with a complicated cutting edge is not simple. Then the role of design as well as functional decomposition becomes important.

To increase independence, Scrum A teams are designed to be a team feature , working on a specific product or group of functions. I don't know which method the Firebase implementation team is organized in, but despite sharing a common vision of products, Firebase Database, Firebase Testlab … still have a big fragmentation in how to configure and use (console or API …) because they are organized according to the feature team . Architecturally you may not be satisfied because the integration between these components is not really natural and consistent; But in terms of product development, this is highly effective because Google only takes 12 months to produce a large set of useful services.

The Scrum of Scrums is the same, this is a very natural way to organize large-scale product development by scaling up instead of scale out . Other methods almost share this vision, but have higher maturity (and, of course, more complex).

ITZone via gurunh.com