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

 * Scrum of scrums etherpad
 * Scrum of scrums video call (Wednesdays, 15:35 – 16:00 UTC)
 * Scrum of scrums/Template

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

 * Wiki
 * Within 24 hours after the weekly Scrum of Scrums meeting on Wednesdays, copy this week’s content from the etherpad to subpage of this page. Example: Scrum of scrums/2019-03-20.
 * Create the page with source editor. That will remove all formatting. (If you have New wikitext mode enabled in Special:Preferences it will double every new line when pasting from the etherpad. Consider disabling it for this step.)
 * Fix formatting errors (mostly whitespace) and typos.
 * Make sure that all blocking/blocked tasks are in both teams. (If team A is blocked by team B with task T, the task should be in blocked section of team A and blocking section of team B.)
 * Delete empty sections (teams with no updates, blocking/blocked/updates with no content).
 * Etherpad
 * Copy source of Scrum of scrums/Template page to the etherpad.
 * E-mail
 * To: wikitech-l.
 * Subject: . Example:
 * Body:
 * URL of the wiki page.
 * Source of the wiki page.
 * Example: [Wikitech-l] Scrum of scrums/2019-05-01
 * Check wikitech-l about once a week to see if the email sparked any questions.

Meeting notes
