Metronome facilitaties the Scrum of Scrums
Scrum of Scrums – Many organizations have distributed teams. In such cases the Program Board is not in a central location and remote participants have to follow along using web cams. Our experience has found that none of the webcams or screenshots do justice to enable the RTEs and scrum masters to be able to view the entire Program Board. Further, the Program Board is not very portable and is very hard to maintain during an organization’s execution of the Program Increment (PI). Read on to learn more, but also be sure to check out our short video on the Scrum of Scrums in Metronome.
In order to keep the “train on the tracks” during the execution of the PI, the scrum masters of the various teams in the train meet with the Release Train Engineer (RTE). Their prime objective is to track the progress of the teams thus far as well as to raise any issues that are cross-team dependent.
In order to facilitate their discussions and track progress for the Scrum of Scrums, both scrum masters and RTEs can easily access the Program Board in Metronome.
The Scrum master can easily communicate the progress of his/her team to the team members using Metronome. The Program Board displays the completed stories and features with a strike through. It displays the total number of story points committed during iteration planning as well as the total number of story points completed in the iteration thus far. It also calculates the percentage of story points completed by the team for the iteration.
The progress of the team is visually displayed by a progress bar. Scrum masters can also view the interdependencies between the teams and discuss the impact of any delays to respective stories and features. The feature progress report in Metronome tracks the status of features and enablers during the PI execution. It indicates which features are on track or behind at any point in time. This is very helpful for the Scrum of Scrums.
Another great tool that can be used to discuss any delays or issues is the Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD). This is a great tool for tracking the team’s progress and can also be used for forecasting any delays at the program level. Using the CFD, scrum masters and the RTE’s can easily the check the work accomplished, work in progress and the work yet to start in the backlog.
Large areas on the CFD indicate that there is a bottle neck, enabling scrum masters and RTEs to more effectively work together to reduce the negative impact or eliminate it all together.
In conclusion, unique features within Metronome such as the CRD, key program report and rapid/easy access to the Program Board enables your Scrum Masters and RTEs enhanced visibility to what is really occurring within the teams, resulting in increased team progress and productivity.
This post is part of a series highlighting Metronome’s support for SAFe ceremonies including the Scrum of Scrums. Jump to the series…
