Posted on May 19th, 2022.

Enterprise-scale software development can be difficult to coordinate across multiple teams. For Agile-adhering IT organizations, Scrum of Scrums is one way to stay organized.

The Scrum of Scrums framework

What is Scrum of Scrums?

Scrum of Scrums is a method that coordinates the efforts of multiple app dev teams to enable integration and collaboration among all parties. The approach is simple and provides a basic level of coordination across a small number of -- ideally five or less -- development teams.

Scrum of Scrums is limited to coordinating the development team's activities and is not intended to be an overall approach to project management delivery. If each Scrum team can self-organize well, then Scrum of Scrums will be successful.

What is on a Scrum of Scrums meeting agenda?

A Scrum of Scrums meeting assesses work progress across the teams. At this meeting, the following four questions should be answered:

What has your team done since the last meeting?

What will be done before next meeting?

Is anything slowing down a team?

Are you about to put something in another team's way?

Who should participate in a Scrum of Scrums meeting?

Every Scrum team in the enterprise should have a representative in each meeting. The representative who attends the meeting may or may not be the Scrum Master. Alternatively, each team may rotate who attends among different team members; it depends on the individual Scrum team.

Ideally, the product owner facilitates the Scrum of Scrums session. However, the project manager who supports feature delivery can facilitate the meeting in organizations with a project management office -- or with distributed project manager resources.

How often should a Scrum of Scrums meeting be held?

Scrum of Scrums meetings may happen weekly or more frequently depending on the need. The cadence may also increase as software deliveries approach and/or if there are cross-team impediments to resolve.

Scrum of Scrums requirements

The product owner and representatives from each Scrum team need to provide dedicated support to Scrum of Scrums activities. In practice, the methodology's execution can be via emails or instant messages instead of scheduled meetings. Many teams have more successful collaboration this way and find it more time effective to collaborate using a messaging platform.

The product owner may wish to consider creating group chats/channels centered around specific features. If so, the individual Scrum team engineering manager and development product manager should be invited to the channel.

Developers can also be invited; this is especially useful when a Scrum team has rotating representation in the Scrum of Scrums. Such an approach has the additional advantage of keeping the entire Scrum team aware of the cross-development effort and impediments that may arise -- impediments that could, for example, directly affect individual sprints or sprint planning.

Where (and how) Scrum of Scrums can fail

For Scrum of Scrums to be effective, it needs skilled facilitators. Such leaders are tough to find and are largely the reason why Scrum of Scrums is not commonplace.

In many IT organizations, the product owner responsible for the feature's delivery is also responsible for that Scrum of Scrums facilitation. This responsibility is even more likely to fall to that product owner if there isn't a program management support team.

That can be too much for one person to handle; after all, a product owner already has many features they must deliver and many stakeholders with which to coordinate. Therefore, that owner may frequently hold sessions that function closer to status update meetings in lieu of a Scrum of Scrums. This approach loses some of the key benefits of Scrum, specifically the transparency and adaption found through its empirical process.

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