Inter-team Coordination in Large-Scale Globally Distributed Scrum: Do Scrum-of-Scrums Really Work?

Scrum-of-Scrums meeting is mentioned in the literature as the mechanism for handling inter-team coordination in large-scale Scrum. However, how to implement it in projects with tens of teams is not explained. In this paper, we present a multiple case study on how Scrum-of-Scrum meetings were applied in two large-scale, globally distributed Scrum projects both employing at least twenty Scrum teams. We conducted 58 semi-structured interviews of project personnel, including managers, architects, product owners, developers and testers. Our results show that Scrum-of-Scrum meetings involving representatives from all teams were severely challenged: the audience was too wide to keep everybody interested and the participants did not know what to report that might be valuable to other teams, often ending up not reporting anything. As a solution, one of the case projects introduced feature-specific Scrum-of-Scrums meetings for 3-5 teams working on the same feature, which turned out to work well. However, challenges with coordination at the project level remained. The other case organization tried a site-based SoS structure that still did not work well.