The Agile Pocket Guide: A Quick Start to Making Your Business Agile Using Scrum and Beyond

Chapter 18

Scrum of Scrums

I love daily stand-ups. I love quick and efficient meetings that enable everyone to get on the same page and understand the work that lies ahead for the day. I love being able to communicate the team's daily goal and the highest-priority items that need to receive immediate attention. Most of this happens in the Daily Scrum, but there is some information that needs to be disseminated to managers or other teams. If you have multiple teams, cross-team issues, or other dependencies that need to be discussed, then it may be a cue to have a so-called Scrum of Scrums.

A Scrum of Scrums is a Scrum team made up of representatives from each of several other teams. In multiple code base teams, this is absolutely essential. I've consulted with IT departments that have multiple teams utilizing different code bases and have different managers for each team. How is it possible to keep up with all of the information shared between those teams, and the goals each team works toward, with their interdependencies and complex interplay of resources? Again, you need a Scrum of Scrums.

A Scrum of Scrums meeting can happen right after a regular Scrum meeting. Like any regular Scrum team, the Scrum of Scrums works iteratively to deliver value in the form of removing organizational and cross-functional team obstacles, dependencies, and conflicts. Just like a regular Scrum stand-up, the purpose of the Scrum of Scrums meeting is to resolve escalated obstacles or resolve dependencies ...