[teampractices] Here comes the scrum of scrums

Wed Oct 9 23:49:24 UTC 2013

I am excited to announce our first scrum of scrums meeting will be taking
place on Tuesday, 15 October, at 1030am PDT in R37, and recurring weekly
thereafter.

This came about through discussion on the teampractices mailing list and
with individual engineering teams. For those of you who don't know what I'm
talking about, this meeting is a regular check-in to facilitate inter-team
communication around technical issues, interdependencies, blockers, etc. It
is intended to be technical in nature, with technical representatives from
participating teams acting as 'pigs' with anyone else in attendance as
'chickens' [1]  (specific details are at the end of this mail). It is NOT
intended to be like the weekly features team meeting of yesteryear - rather
it will be facilitated technical conversation around tactical/on the
ground/day-to-day issues to hopefully improve communication and
collaboration between the different engineering teams - not a status update
for directors.

Teams who have already agreed to participate and send a representative are:
* Analytics
* Flow
* Growth
* Mobile app
* Mobile partners (Wikipedia Zero)
* Mobile web
* Operations
* Platform
* QA
* VisualEditor

If your team isn't on this list but you think it should be, please let me
know and we can get you a calendar invite. And remember, this meeting is
open for anyone to attend, but the conversation will be primarily between
the technical representatives of participating teams to expedite technical
coordination, etc.

The meeting details are:
* Frequency of once per week
* One technical rep from each team that wants to participate (rep can
rotate)
* 30 minute timebox (we originally talked about 60, but it was impossible
to schedule a 60 minute block to accommodate participating teams'
schedules. If 30 mins doesn't work, we can adjust)
* The following questions are addressed by each team rep:
** What has your team done since we last met?
** What will your team do before we meet again?
** Is anything slowing your team down or getting in their way?
** Are you about to put something in another team’s way?
* Any conversation out of scope is handled appropriately by facilitator
* Notes should be taken and archived
* It is the responsibility of the team rep to disseminate appropriate
information to their team/ensure commitments made during SoS are fulfilled
* Keep the meeting open to chickens, but only allow them to actively
participate in the conversation as needed
* We'll retrospect after a month to assess the utility of this and see
where we can make improvements

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicken_and_the_Pig (And FWIW it's
been pointed out to me that the Chicken/Pig analogy is offensive to some
and is potentially inaccurate, as it can be construed to suggest that the
engineers are the only ones with any skin in the game, which is just untrue
given the nature of our teams. Since I do not currently have a better
analogy and find this to be a succinct way to simplistically illustrate the
point, I included it here. If you have suggestions for something better, do
let me know.)
-- 
Arthur Richards
Software Engineer, Mobile
[[User:Awjrichards]]
IRC: awjr
+1-415-839-6885 x6687
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