Scaling Scrum

Scrum is a framework for developing and sustaining complex products. It's used by teams in software and other industries. Scrum provides a set of principles, values and rules for how teams coordinate their work to build products that are of high quality, meet stakeholder needs and can be released frequently.

What is scaling?

Scaling is the process of increasing the size of a project. It can be done by adding more people, or by adding more teams. Scaling is usually done to increase productivity, but it can also be done to increase capacity.

What is the scrum of scrums?

The scrum of scrums is a meeting of all the scrum teams in an organization. The purpose of this group is to share information and synchronize activities across multiple teams, rather than within each individual team.

The scrum of scrums is led by the product owner, who participates in the daily standups and backlog grooming sessions of each team. In addition to providing visibility into your project's overall progress, this person can also help identify non-automated tasks that need to be added to your team's backlogs for completion later on down the road (or during future sprints).

Why scale scrum?

You should scale scrum if you're trying to get more done in your organization. Scrum is a wildly-successful framework for managing software teams, but the framework itself only provides you with the tools necessary to run your team. If you want to make the most of scrum's benefits, then you'll need to know how to use those tools well.

How to scale your scrum?

Agile teams split up into smaller teams to work on different parts of a product. This is called scrum of scrums and it's a common practice to scale Agile in large organizations.

In order to scale scrum, create a multi-team scrum board where each team gets its own column or row. The columns are used by the product owner (PO) and the rows are used by each team’s PO.

The POs will use this board to plan their sprints, estimate stories and prioritize features from the backlog accordingly. When creating your initial sprint backlogs, start by choosing one feature from your product vision as an MVP for each sprint that you can build with your initial velocity (the number of story points you are able to deliver per iteration). At the end of each sprint, review whether this MVP worked as expected or if more features should be added in future iterations based on feedback from customers/users etcetera

Multi-team dependencies

• Dependencies between teams.
• The scrum of scrums.

You might have noticed that at the end of each sprint, there are often dependencies between teams to complete their work in the next sprint. This is especially true when there's a dependency between development and testing or product management and design. If you've never encountered this sort of thing before, it can be confusing: who should be involved in what stage of the process? When should they meet? And how do they know when to escalate if things have gone awry?

To help mitigate these issues as your software evolves and grows more complex, there's an approach called "The Scrum Of Scrums." Here's how it works:

The art of the possible is more important than the art of the perfect.

Scrum has become an industry standard for software development because it focuses on creating value by delivering small batches of valuable results to customers. Getting things done well is more important than getting things done quickly, but delivering a few things well will always beat delivering many things poorly.

Create a culture which supports and encourages good collaboration between teams.

One way to do this is with the scrum of scrums. The scrum of scrums (SOC) is a meeting at the top level of the organisation, run by product owners who represent each team in the organisation. The SOC allows all stakeholders to talk about progress on their projects and make decisions that affect multiple teams, such as deciding whether or not to accept new features into an existing product or adding resources to a project that has become overstaffed.

Conclusion

The scrum of scrums is a way to make sure that everyone on your team knows what’s going on across all the teams in your organization. If you’re thinking about scaling scrum and want more information, reach out! We would love to help you figure out how this can work for you.