Scrum of scrums

Many Wikimedia Engineering teams are using the scrum agile method. To keep projects and teams abreast of one another, we have a weekly scrum of scrums (SoS) meeting where representatives from each department exchange updates. The meeting is currently held on Wednesdays at 17:35 UTC (10:35 Pacific), and is facilitated by a rotating chair.

Resources

 * etherpad
 * video call

Expectations

 * Please have your updates in the etherpad before the meeting starts.
 * Do not read your content in the etherpad out loud.
 * Instead:
 * Indicate blockers or teams that you are about to block.
 * Be selective in speaking to things that truly are affecting a larger portion of the development community.
 * Share higher-level summaries of changes that will impact other teams, call-outs, asking each other questions, and celebrating successes.
 * Share relevant info from meeting with your team.

Rules of engagement

 * If you must miss a meeting and cannot send a proxy, then before the meeting please enter your answers to the SoS questions (below) on the meeting etherpad.
 * Be prepared. Have your updates and dependencies ready, and, review/update the dependency wall before the meeting.

Each representative 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?

At the meeting

 * Ensure meeting starts/ends on time.
 * Ensure conversation stays focused and relevant. Direct conversations to happen off-line as needed.
 * Ensure there is an owner for cross-team commitments when possible (e.g. 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.
 * It is valuable to highlight particularly important action items/needs/touch-points.
 * 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 dependency board via email.

After the meeting

 * Within 24 hours after the weekly Scrum of Scrums meeting on Wednesdays, copy this week’s content from the etherpad to an empty email.
 * Convert all text to black.
 * Convert background to white.
 * Go to previous week’s notes on mediawiki, for example: Scrum of scrums/2019-03-20.
 * Change the date to reflect this week’s meeting date.
 * Mediawiki will ask if you want to create that page, you do.
 * Copy contents of email to this week’s mediawiki page.
 * Publish.
 * Fix formatting errors.
 * Copy the URL of this week’s page to the top of the email.
 * Make subject line of email, 2019-03-20 Scrum of Scrums meeting notes. Replace date with current date.
 * Send the email to wikitech-l.
 * Check wikitech-l about once a week to see if the email sparked any questions.

Meeting notes
