Scaling up Scrum

Challenges and Tips

Kostas Rigas

❖ 10 years experience as a Software engineer.❖ 3 years experience as a Scrum master.❖ Agile enthusiast.❖ Worked in many global projects, with a lot of teams that tried to

scale scrum.❖ Currently I am working in a global project of 140 people (more than

10 teams scrum teams)

Agile development works well with 1-2 teams but the challenges appear when the organization decides to

scale up.

Challenges

● Coordination● Integration● Technical Integrity

Work across the teams...

Coordinating work across the teams (Tips)

❖ Lookahead planning (2-3 sprints).➢ Common Planning events between teams (Big room planning)

Coordinating work across the teams (Tips)

❖ Dependency Management ➢ Visualize Dependencies (via boards or web tools).

Coordinating work across the teams (Tips)

❖ Dependency Management➢ Feature teams (instead of component teams).

Integrating work across the teams (Tips)❖ Common definition of DONE (including integration tests).

Integrating work across the teams (Tips)❖ Integration team

➢ Not full time job.➢ Resolve issues related with the integrated product increment.➢ Help the teams with CI/CD etc.

Maintaining Technical Integrity (Tips)

❖ Global coding standards / practices.❖ Technical stewards. (Quality Gatekeepers per component)❖ T-Shape people. (via Travellers)

Extra Tips

Global Events

❖ Planning❖ Refinement❖ Daily❖ Sprint Review❖ Retrospectives

Artifacts

❖ One shared Product Backlog❖ Multiple Sprint Backlogs.❖ One Integrated Potentially Shippable Product Increment.❖ Dependency Board.❖ Risk Board.*

Roles

❖ Chief Product Owner

Estimation and Release Planning

❖ Project velocity vs Team’s velocity❖ Release burndown chart

Communities of practice

Example: Testing Community

Characteristics

❖ Self organizing❖ Not a full time job❖ Typically 5-20 hours/month

Lack of understanding

Agile principles / Scrum framework

❖ Agile coaching

❖ One scrum master per team

❖ Team training

Frameworks for Scaling scrum

Frameworks for Scaling scrum

Frameworks for Scaling scrum

Quote by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde

….That rarely happens ”

“ How can we calculate how many people we will need ?

Our suggestion is “Start with a small group of great people and only grow when it really starts to hurt”

The End

Q&A

Resources and References

★ Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS by Craig Larman, Bas Vodde

★ Scaling Scrum with Nexus★ Scaling Agile and working with distributed teams

by Mike Cohn ★ Agile Teams at scale by Esther Derby★ Scaled Agile framework ★ Scrum Multiple-teams Frameworks★ Top 10 agile metrics kpis

Created by Kostas Rigas