Scrum of scrums

Wikimedia engineering teams are often using the scrum agile method. To keep projects and team in sync, we have a scrum of scrums team or a SOS. It happens weekly and is driven by a rotating lead.

WMF Phabricator has a Scrum-of-Scrums project, its project workboard is SOS Phabricator board, but the saved query maniphest/query/iYosD4_9SSPW/ seems more useful to view these cards. See below.

Expectations

 * On time, we'll start without you
 * Engineers speak
 * Keep it BRIEF, and relevant; we only have 30 minutes, and we will be strict about the time box
 * Each team representative is responsible for bringing findings here back to their team

Rules of engagement

 * If you must miss a meeting and cannot send a proxy, you must mail your answers to the SoS questions to the engineering list list and make necessary updates to the dependency wall.
 * Be prepared. Have your updates and dependencies ready, and, review/update the dependency wall before the meeting.

Each rep answers the following:
 * 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?

Facilitator responsibilities

 * Ensure meeting starts/ends on time
 * Ensure conversation stays focussed and relevant; direct conversations to happen off-line as needed
 * Ensure there is an owner for cross-team commitments when possible (eg if one team needs a particular patch reviewed urgently, try to get someone in the room to commit to helping them out)
 * Ensure dependency wall is up-to-date
 * Ensure clear notes are taken and posted (traditionally emailed to engineering@lists.wikimedia.org as a link to a wiki page (see below)).
 * It is valuable to highlight particularly important action items/needs/touchpoints
 * It is also valuable to keep track of which teams are present at SoS and encourage missing teams to respond to the questions/review the dep board via email

More on Phabricator
You can add any task to the Scrum-of-Scrums project by adding "Scrum-of-Scrums" to its Projects field. You can also refer to the project with hashtag,  , or.

When you add a task with the Scrum-of-Scrums project it should be obvious which team needs something from another. You should add both team's tracking projects to the task, and either add a comment explaining the need, rephrase the title, or add the requesting team's tracking task to its 'Blocks list.

The Scrum of Scrums was originally a card wall in Mingle; ping Arthur if would like to have write access to this.

Blocked tasks
Need to pick an approach from: These aren't displayed in Maniphest query results, and 2 and 3 aren't shown in the workboard.
 * 1) Drag task to Blocked column in  SoS workboard.
 * 2) Change task's status from Open to Stalled, you can query for that and group query display by status.
 * 3) Enter the team's high-level task that depends on this task to its Blocks field.