How Kendis can help you conduct Scrum of Scrums

What is a Scrum of Scrums Meeting in a Scaled Agile Framework?

The scrum of scrums meeting is where the progress of multiple team’s work is organized and synchronized. In the Scaled Agile Framework, the Release Train Engineer (RTE) is known to be the ultimate Servant Leader of the Agile Release Train. Participants of this meeting are scrum masters of the respective Agile Teams of an Agile Release Train.

The scrum of scrums meeting can be held once or multiple times a week. Frequency of these synchronization sessions may vary depending on the urgency and the number of issues an Agile Release Train encounters.

The objective of this meeting is to discuss the work and progress of the Program Increment. But when it comes to aligning and coordinating with multiple teams, it becomes tasking for the Release Train Engineer to visualize the progress and bottlenecks of each agile team. Thus it becomes difficult to keep track of what all the teams are working on. With Kendis, all of this is simplified with our customizable board.

Conducting Scrum of Scrums using Kendis

It is the absolute tool for the Release Train Engineer that provides an elaborate and intricate view to know status of the entire release train. A useful tool in planning a Program Increment or a Solution Increment contents.

The customizable board presents to the Release Train Engineer and stakeholders, which work items each team is working on. It further displays which feature is blocking progress of other teams. Using Kendis Integrations with Jira, you can fetch agile teams data merely and can create, edit, and delete Jira items using Kendis. Integration also supports to configure a Kendis board by using saved Jira filters.

Kendis gives a singular view for Planning of Solution Trains, which involves hundreds of team members and aligns them and coordinates their work brilliantly.

Release Train where feature set backlog is at left panel and three teams work is distributed in three sprints

With the board in place, the Release Train Engineer can see the teams on the board and this leads to the beginning of the scrum of scrums.

Similar to the infamous questions asked by every scrum master in their scrum meetings, there are questions that are the core of a scrum of scrums. According to the Veteran of Scrum Software Development Methodology, Mike Cohn, there are four questions that act as guidelines to conduct a scrum of scrums. After reading the answers to these questions, you will realize the vast functionality and insightfulness of Kendis.

What has your team done since we last met?

The board in Kendis shows the teams in an Agile Release Train as one category. This shows all the features, user stories or tasks that are done per team. It also shows the tasks that are in progress or that have not been done. The feature dependencies amongst teams are visible the same way as they may be in a physical board. You can use different colors to show the nature of dependencies and change it according to its status.

What will your team do before we meet again?

The Feature Backlog shows how many work items are left and what needs to be done next.

But to know the current status of a sprint, Kendis has AI-Based Analytics. These consist of statistics which are presented in a tabulated form. The progress is illustrated by bar charts. The data present in the tables is used to calculate and cleverly predict the status of each sprint, its quality of planning, feature completion rate and delay impacts.

Is anything slowing your team down or getting in their way?

Slowing down means that a team is facing issues. You can create a separate category for recording these impediments and view their progress in Kendis. If agile teams are using any impediment category, you can fetch them from any agile teams tool, i.e Jira, that has been integrated with Kendis. You can also create a new card* and keep it solely in Kendis for these impediments. These impediments can be linked with the work item card to show the dependency. The color of the dependency changes to green when it has been resolved.

Work item card can be a feature, epic, user story, task or an issue

Dependency Tracking using Kendis

Are you about to put something in another team’s way?

Moving a kendis card from one team to another can be simply done by dragging it to the new team area. If the configuration with Jira is set then the responsibility will also be changed in Jira accordingly. The feature can be divided among different teams which can be done with a simple click and the changes will be made in Jira.

Multiple tasks in Kendis can be dependent on other tasks. These dependencies can be set by the team as they want. With a simple click, the Release Train Engineer can look into these dependencies and know their status. They are clearly visible on the board which guide in tracking and managing the features effortlessly. This will allow them to understand why a task is being blocked or not finished and how is it hindering their team from moving forward.

Seeing how Kendis has an answer to all the question put forth, it is needless to say that it is the best tool for scaled agile software development.

The benefit of having a scrum of scrums visualized is that it enhances transparency. It further allows the Release Train Engineer to anticipate the result of the Program Increment. This also ensures that the Release Train Engineer doesn’t have to personally contact each scrum master every minute to know what is going on. With just one glance on the boards in Kendis, they can know pulse of release train.