This presentation is about strategies and tactics for working effectively with multiple Scrum teams in a global environment

1. Scaling up Scrum
Challenges and Tips

2. 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)

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

4. Challenges
● Coordination
● Integration
● Technical Integrity
Work across the teams...

5. Coordinating work across the teams (Tips)
❖ Lookahead planning (2-3 sprints).
➢ Common Planning events between teams (Big room planning)

6. Coordinating work across the teams (Tips)
❖ Dependency Management
➢ Visualize Dependencies (via boards or web tools).

7. Coordinating work across the teams (Tips)
❖ Dependency Management
➢ Feature teams (instead of component teams).

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

9. 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.

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

11. Extra Tips

12. Global Events
❖ Planning
❖ Refinement
❖ Daily
❖ Sprint Review
❖ Retrospectives

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

14. Roles
❖ Chief Product Owner

15. Estimation and Release Planning
❖ Project velocity vs Team’s velocity
❖ Release burndown chart

16. Communities of practice
Example: Testing Community
Characteristics
❖ Self organizing
❖ Not a full time job
❖ Typically 5-20 hours/month

17. Lack of understanding
Agile principles / Scrum framework
❖ Agile coaching
❖ One scrum master per team
❖ Team training

18. Frameworks for Scaling scrum

19. Frameworks for Scaling scrum

20. Frameworks for Scaling scrum

21. 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”

22. 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