Scrum of Scrums is an important ceremony that brings together Scrum Masters and Team representatives to discuss dependencies, talk about impediments that are hindering team progress and share the important highlights.
Often it's done through a combination of different tools, and it's not efficient and easy to keep track of what is discussed and how to follow up.
Kendis is bringing this revolutionary design of Scrum of Scrums that is unique and built based on tens of different interviews and studying in-depth challenges faced by RTEs / Delivery Managers and Scrum Masters in running their Scrum of Scrums session.
With this release, we provide a central place to run your Scrum of Scrums session with ease.
Scrum of Scrums is available under "More Menu"
Key Points to Understand
All Teams: This section is reserved for "Program Level" or all the team's overviews. If you are using SAFe then RTE can use this section to provide their updates. For other methodologies, Delivery or Program Managers who are responsible for the program can use this section to share the highlights. Impediments and Action Points are for all the teams. Progress updates are mainly focused on features.
Teams: Each team with its own selected color has a section that can be expanded to view the relevant details.
Highlights & Impediments: This is a free text section with a few styling options to provide an overview at the program level or team level. Scrum Masters could fill up the details before starting the session thus making it efficient to focus on the specific points, e.g., why they are blocked, what they achieved, and from whom they need the help. This can avoid the need of repeating the whole story of what and why they need help.
Impediments: Anything that slows down or hinders a team's productivity is considered an impediment.
Blocked: There is an option to show the "Flagged/Blocked" cards for boards integrated with Jira. At your board settings under the additional settings tab, there is an option to enable Jira Flagged field. This will enable the real-time update of any item being flagged at Jira to be reflected at Kendis. A red flag means the feature is blocked and an orange color means, one of the stories related to the feature is blocked/flagged.
Progress: A number of different stats are available at the "All Teams" and "Teams" areas. It shows dependencies, risks, objectives, features, and stories progress. To view the details click on the numbers
How it works
Dates are very important for Scrum of Scrums setup. If your sprints/iterations dates at Kendis board are not configured properly, it may impact the experience.
Sprint Dates and Progress Section
Based on the sprint start and end date, Kendis will automatically select the "Active" sprint
Active sprint stats will be shown on the "Progress" section at Scrum of Scrums
If no active sprint is available, no stats will be shown.
Board state must be in the "Tracking" to show the progress. If the board is not in the Tracking state, the progress section will be disabled.
Setup for the Scrum of Scrums
On the new board, when you access the Scrum of Scrums section for the first time, you would be asked to set the dates, frequency, and time of each Scrum of Scrum session.
Steps to configure
Select Start and end dates
Select frequency of the session is it weekly or bi-weekly.
On each week, which days do you want to have the session
Select time for each day
Select the "Base" timezone, each user will see the time in their local timezone but the calculation of the local time will be based on this timezone selection.
Virtual Call Link: You are able to define the "MS Teams", "Zoom" or any other meeting link for your Scrum of Scrums session.
Show upcoming sessions: When you enable this button you can see all the upcoming sessions. You have the option to cancel any session or change the room link for that specific session. It is useful in cases when the organizer is on holiday and others need to change the meeting link.
Teams and Reminders
In this section, you can select if you would like to remind your Scrum Masters or Team representatives to update the highlights, impediments, and action points before the start of the call.
This comes in handy as RTEs don't need to chase the team members to get ready for their updates. The settings are configurable.
Other Enhancements in this release
In cases when the load is higher than the capacity set for each team and sprint, you will see a red triangle indicating this situation. It is helpful to quickly understand the sprints/iterations where some replanning is required.
This trial is visible all the time in the relevant sprints in the team area.
On the main program board, if you mouse over the "info icon" then if the load is higher than the capacity you will see the red triangle.
Dependency Emails
With this release, dependencies emails will be triggered automatically. On the dependencies edit view, there is an option to "unselect" the "Notify Watchers" checkbox to avoid sending the updates.
Triggers for Dependency Emails
When a new dependency is created, the responsible set in the dependency will receive an email
When a dependency is updated, all the watches will receive an update in case "Notify Watchers" is not unchecked.
When a dependency target date is moved
When a dependency is deleted.
Note: These notifications are only for the dependencies that are created at Kendis. In the case of dependency links created in Jira/AzureDevOps, they are shown as blue lines and not