I asked Patrick Waara of Xerox about swarming being used as an Agile response when someone’s in trouble in the middle of an iteration. I followed up with, “When does someone raise their hand or does the Scrum master determine that you need outside help and talks with the other Scrum masters? How do you go about that process to bring in the help?”
Related Podcast & Transcription: Agile Software Development at Xerox
Patrick: Generally, you’ll start seeing ?? and it depends on how big your iterations are. Typically around here, our iterations are reasonably short. We generally have two-week iterations. It’s usually during the retrospective or the review meeting where this information will come out more across teams.
Within the team, or course, you’ll start seeing that in your daily Scrum. If people have barriers, or they’re getting into trouble, they’ll come out in the daily Scrum.
Usually then, at the end of the retrospective, they’ll say look we’re behind. What didn’t work well? Well, guess what, we weren’t delivering our commitments, we’ve got these issues. What are we going to do about it?
Well, we need some more help. That’s when you can utilize this Scrum of scrums notion that I talked about before. Where the scrum masters from the various teams can start getting together and talking about inter-team issues.
If one of the Scrum master’s teams is having trouble, they can bring that up at the Scrum of Scrums. There at that level, start discussing what would be the best approach to fixing it.
Often what happens is the Scrum masters will bring that information back to their teams. The teams will collaborate and figure out what’s the best way to address the problem.
It’s this whole notion of again; self-directed teams. The Scrum master doesn’t come down and start telling people, “Hey, you guys have to go work on this other team.” But, it’s really more of an information flow. And say, “Hey guys, this is what I’m hearing about the project, what do you think we can do?”
The teams will then try to self-direct and figure out what’s the best way to approach. Now, of course, they also need to make sure that the product owners are all in line with priorities. If the team that’s the farthest behind, if they’re the lowest priority, then that’s the thing that’s going to fall behind.
If they’re a higher priority on the product backlog, those items will be higher so, just like we talked about this morning. People from other teams will then go over, and they’ll start dog piling these higher issues.
If they need to break it down into smaller chunks, the other teams can take on some of that work and then they can work on those higher priorities together.
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