Multiple-Team Coordination

Scrum scales not by having increasingly larger development teams, but instead by having multiple right-sized Scrum teams. When there is more than one Scrum team, however, we have the issue of how to coordinate those teams. Two techniques for multiteam coordination are the scrum of scrums and the more comprehensive form of multiteam coordination known as a release train.

Scrum of Scrums

In Chapter 2 I noted that each day during sprint execution the development team performs a daily scrum. Each team’s daily scrum includes only the members of that Scrum team.

A common approach to coordinating work among multiple teams is the scrum of scrums or SoS (see Figure 12.4).

Figure 12.4. Scrum of scrums

This practice allows multiple teams to coordinate their inter-team work. The team that performs the SoS is composed of individual members of the various development teams. Each development team determines which member to send to the scrum of scrums based on who can best speak to the inter-team dependency issues. Although I prefer to have consistency of representation, the person representing a team at the SoS can change over time based on who is best able to represent the team and speak to the issues at that point in time.