I am excited to announce our first scrum of scrums meeting will be taking place on Tuesday, 15 October, at 1030am PDT in R37, and recurring weekly thereafter.
This came about through discussion on the teampractices mailing list and with individual engineering teams. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, this meeting is a regular check-in to facilitate inter-team communication around technical issues, interdependencies, blockers, etc. It is intended to be technical in nature, with technical representatives from participating teams acting as 'pigs' with anyone else in attendance as 'chickens' [1] (specific details are at the end of this mail). It is NOT intended to be like the weekly features team meeting of yesteryear - rather it will be facilitated technical conversation around tactical/on the ground/day-to-day issues to hopefully improve communication and collaboration between the different engineering teams - not a status update for directors. Teams who have already agreed to participate and send a representative are: * Analytics * Flow * Growth * Mobile app * Mobile partners (Wikipedia Zero) * Mobile web * Operations * Platform * QA * VisualEditor If your team isn't on this list but you think it should be, please let me know and we can get you a calendar invite. And remember, this meeting is open for anyone to attend, but the conversation will be primarily between the technical representatives of participating teams to expedite technical coordination, etc. The meeting details are: * Frequency of once per week * One technical rep from each team that wants to participate (rep can rotate) * 30 minute timebox (we originally talked about 60, but it was impossible to schedule a 60 minute block to accommodate participating teams' schedules. If 30 mins doesn't work, we can adjust) * The following questions are addressed by each team rep: ** 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? * Any conversation out of scope is handled appropriately by facilitator * Notes should be taken and archived * It is the responsibility of the team rep to disseminate appropriate information to their team/ensure commitments made during SoS are fulfilled * Keep the meeting open to chickens, but only allow them to actively participate in the conversation as needed * We'll retrospect after a month to assess the utility of this and see where we can make improvements [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicken_and_the_Pig (And FWIW it's been pointed out to me that the Chicken/Pig analogy is offensive to some and is potentially inaccurate, as it can be construed to suggest that the engineers are the only ones with any skin in the game, which is just untrue given the nature of our teams. Since I do not currently have a better analogy and find this to be a succinct way to simplistically illustrate the point, I included it here. If you have suggestions for something better, do let me know.) -- Arthur Richards Software Engineer, Mobile [[User:Awjrichards]] IRC: awjr +1-415-839-6885 x6687
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