Tool Mentor: Conducting a Scrum of Scrums Meeting with Rational Team Concert

Synopsis

The Agile Release Train (ART) is a long-lived team of agile teams, typically consisting of 50–125 individuals, that serves as the program-level value delivery mechanism in SAFe. Using a common cadence, each train has the dedicated resources necessary to continuously define, built, test and deliver value to one of the enterprises value streams. Each train produces valuable and evaluate-able, system-level increments every two weeks, and additional PI, Program Increment milestones every 8–12 weeks. ARTs can Release at any time in accordance with market needs.

Details

Prepare

The Release train engineer is responsible for ensuring that the Scrum of Scrums occurs. This involves the following steps.

Step

Tool guidance

1. Send out invitations

Send out Scrum of Scrums invitations.

See Meetings and Rational Team Concert.

Conduct

The Release Train Engineer facilitates the meeting, ensuring that it stays within the allocated time.

Step

Tool guidance

1. Scrum of Scrums Agenda

The Teams discuss what went well during the previous meetings:

What did your team accomplish since the last meeting?
What will your team accomplish between now and the next meeting?
Are there any blocking issues?
Are you about to block someone else's way?

Display the team dashboard:

Click Project Dashboards > All [Project name] Dashboards > [Team Name] > Scrum of Scrums tab
There are widgets for each of the categories of work items to be discussed at the meeting.

Challenges, or impediments are recorded as Risks. An impediment is a risk with 100% probability.

Blocks are recorded by establishing the blocks relationship from work item A to B (or equivalently, a depends on from B to A).

To create a relationship, open the work item, then click on Links. For a block, select Add Blocks. For a dependency, select Add Depends On.

2. Discuss what to do for the Meet After/Problem Solving meeting

Affected parties stay for problem solving.

3. Follow-up

The Release Train Engineer communicates any major blocks, challenges, or impediments to key stakeholders and the Release Management Team.

Communicate any blocks, challenges, or impediments.

a. Subscribe the user. (ex. Dave the Scrum Master) Subscribers > Suscribed By > Add

b. Add a comment for user directly in the Risk's Discussion section. (ex. @dave - We will need a new service). The user will automatically be notified of the comment.