I want to manage a 3-tier Application Develpoment (Data/Business/Presentation) with scrum in jira but do not know if I use 3 Projects (one for each Layer) or one project and arrange the layers with the epic tag function.
I have found a lot about big scrum projects but not with this structure and the most articles refered to big teams that we do not have.
The problem with tools is that they will attempt to drive your adoption of scrum. I advise stepping away from the tool and considering how you see the approach when simply using scrum. Then see whether the tool will model that.
For the situation you describe, I would think about one product and one product backlog, with multiple product backlog items. The product backlog items would describe vertical slices of functionality that cross all three tiers of your business model
It is unusual when using the Scrum framework to break out the tiers of the application in to separate projects. With Scrum we typically work on user stories that represent vertical slices through an application that deliver some business value.
Separating out the tiers means that:
You create external dependencies, which makes it difficult for teams to resolve their own problems. The Scrum Guide includes the following: "Cross-functional teams have all the competencies needed to accomplish the work without depending on others not part of the team."
Measuring the rate of progress of 'done' software becomes more difficult. The Scrum Guide says: "Incremental deliveries of “Done” product ensure a potentially useful version of working product is always available."
You create a synchronisation and resourcing problem in that the teams have to work at a balanced velocity so that they build the three tiers at a consistent rate. For example, the business tier development mustn't get too far ahead of the presentation tier.
Testing may be less effective as you have integration testing that spans several teams. This makes coordination more difficult and it may increase the time between when the code is written and when bugs are revealed.
Related
We've been using Fogbugz for a few months now, and have about 6 projects (aside from the default Inbox project for incoming mail).
We work in week-long sprints, so we have set up global milestones for each week to prevent having to enter them multiple times (for each project).
The iteration planner doesn't support planning for multiple projects simultaneously.
As we are sprint planning in a global fashion (across all the projects at once), would having one project with multiple areas be a better fit for this workflow/planning?
Does this go against a design principle of Fogbugz, or will it make some features not work correctly?
The documentation on Projects and Areas doesn't mention pros and cons of one over the other.
Lou # Fog Creek replied:
I would say that, instead of pros and cons, there's an idea of grouping for the purposes of planning. Planning units should get their own projects, and any natural subdivisions within that unit most likely merit an Area. The main advantages of Areas is being able to have different primary contacts for workflows and organization.
So it seems the overall design concept of Projects is something that is individually planned, and in this situation, all our activity fits into one Project.
We have a five-member development team and will be building multiple internal projects in parallel. Upon researching, I find it is best to create one team project, even for our situation, correct?
If so, would you please recommend how to set up proper iterations for the projects and timelines?
TFS question - small team, multiple projects sounds similar to my situation, but I can't seem to get more than one "current" iteration in the TFS Agile process board.
Per team project you can have only one iteration tree (and therefore only one current iteration). You should decide based on how you plan your team resources. Do you want to have only a single backlog for the whole team or different backlogs for each project?
Each has its pros and cons, depending whether you want to use Visual Studio Team Service mainly for planning your team resources or planning your projects.
Using a single team project / backlog
With this approach it is easy to plan your whole team's resources for the next sprint. You can assign people to different tasks in different projects and have a good overview on what the team currently is working on. To assign work items to different projects you can use the area path.
Planning and tracking the progress of individual projects is a little bit harder with this approach since you have the same iteration structure for all projects and also only a common set of tags.
There are external tools which can integrate with Visual Studio Team Service available from the marketplace though, which can help you with planning individual projects.
Using a team project per project
With this approach you have a clear overview of the progress of each project and you can have individual iterations, tags, etc.
On the other hand it's harder to plan your team's resources since you won't have a single backlog and no place to see what your team is working on at the moment at a glance.
You can create one team project and set several child projects in it. With this, you can have the things configured for the whole project and also the child projects. Refer to this link for details: Multiple teams
This blog has a definition of epics in JIRA:
Epics are significantly larger bodies of work. Epics are feature-level work that encompasses many user stories. Using the above example, an epic might be the entire account management feature and the ability to see previous purchases.
So if (as a product owner) I have a large feature I want delivered that will comprise many smaller tasks and likely span sprints, then an epic is a good choice.
However, I could just as easily create a (using the example from the blog) "Account Management" component, and any task related to that feature have that component assigned.
Similarly I could also just as easily use a label of "Account_Management", and any stories/tickets that are a part of the Account Management feature simply get tagged with that label.
So my question: why/what circumstances would you use an epic? why/what circumstances would you use a component? Why/what circumstances would you use a label? Ie - all three (epics, labels, components) seem to serve very similar purposes (grouping a collection of issues), what's the difference?
With labels and components if you want to select a group of them you need to use issue search. If you are using epics you can use issue search as well, but you also get built-in functionality in JIRA Agile.
In the backlog view of a JIRA Agile board you have an Epic tab. This tab allows you to select the issues associated with individual epics. Plus it has functionality that makes it simple to add new issues to an epic. The final advantage is that the epic name is displayed brightly coloured alongside the issues in the list. This can be very useful when viewing the backlog and getting a feel for what work is coming up next.
You can see more about epics on the Atlassian Working with Epics page.
Components are useful for the technical team as they can span across many epics. A typical component might be 'database' or 'UI'. JIRA offers the option to assign work for a particular component to a particular JIRA user. For example, all issues created with a component of 'database' could be assigned to Jill Smith.
Labels are much more adaptable and they have the advantage of allowing multiple assignments (so more than one label can be associated with an issue). With labels it is very much up to you how you use them.
Epics by definition are short-lived issues when compared to the project as a whole. Components and Labels on the other hand are forever. And, you should stick to use them by their true meanings however tempting it may be otherwise.
Create Epics for features, or as mentioned by #Sateesh, for bigger stories. They should solve their purpose, and once the business need is done for, they should then be closed/done.
Components are not features. They are the technical parts of the system. They can also be used for categorizing your parts or... well, components :P... of your product.
Labels can be anything, as mentioned by #barnaby. Typically, they are keywords, catch-phrases, words people may want a task to relate to, etc. I use it mainly to make issues better searchable from a long-term perspective. There is a JIRA plugin which gives you a JIRA label cloud (for purely fancy purposes, I feel :D) that might interest you, too.
Addition:
Atlasian now have created a new article explaining this from their perspective.
https://www.atlassian.com/agile/delivery-vehicles
My opinion / usage.
Labels and Components are almost straightforward and well answered already.
Components examples
Android client app
Server API
Database
etc.....
Labels examples.
Business logic sectors (ex Orders,Invoices,Users, Products)
Code Quality Improvement
Refactor
Usability
User request/complain
Generally whatever helps categorize things.
But let me give my two cents about Epics because i find this phrase way too generic.
Epics are significantly larger bodies of work
Larger? 10 Sprints? 10 Stories? 20 Stories? or what?
Personally i would classify Epics as Goals or Major Releases.
At a Yearly / Quarter Retrospective your company holds a meeting with all members and stakeholders , and concludes to the following
We need to target more platforms (epic = Platform Expanding)
Our support personnel needs more tools to handle issues. (Enrich Support tools)
The software is too hard to use! ( Redesign UI UX)
This would mean 3 epics with set of stories to cover each of those generic requirements
Epics are bigger stories which require more than one sprint to complete. One Epic may involve several user stories. Each user story may belong to one or more Component. Say, you have an epic airline availability search. This may have multiple User stories like OW search, RT search etc., Some or all of them may involve components like cache, travel policy & booking engine.
Labels are just for convenience. It may not have physical significance.
I'm looking for a work-item-tracking/bug-tracking system (or JIRA plugin, or TFS plugin, or...) which makes it easy to stack-rank work items without having to manually assign priority values to each work item.
Instead, our team wants to be able to see a list of open work items and be able to drag-n-drop one or a multiple selection of work items until the order matches the team's prioritization. This would be much easier than arguing about priority numbers and dealing with ties (e.g. "which of the 5 bugs marked priority=2 should I work on today?").
Our team is considering switching work-item-trackers (we use Gemini now) and availability of a good drag-n-drop prioritizer is high on our requirements list.
I realize drag-n-drop ranking is non-trivial because no team will stack rank all work items. Instead, we'll want to take a subset (e.g. work items for one sprint sprint or iteration, or bugs assigned to one developer) and stackrank those, then later look at a different subset and stackrank those, etc. And I'm sure we'll sometimes need to mix and match different stacks, so there'd need to be heuristics (ideally configurable) about how to show a stack of items previously stacked separately.
Pivotal Tracker is close to the drag-n-drop UI I'm thinking of from a UI perspective, but Pivotal's model of separating user stories from the underlying work items (plus a few other issues) doesn't match how we want to work. We don't want to have to deal with different artifacts (stories vs. JIRA/BugZilla work items)-- instead we just want a drag-n-drop UI to automatically fill out a "priority" field in the issue tracker, and which we can use later when sorting and filtering. And we wouldn't want to use Pivotal as our only work item tracker, because it seems to lack common features like bulk editing which are critical for large projects.
Anyone know of a tool like what I describe above?
Urban turtle is the best TFS add-on, making ranking/prioritizing a sane activity. Priority by number is a disaster so don't think you're alone there.
http://urbanturtle.com/
Urban Turtle is updated every month and used by quite a few teams including a number of my teams.
Eylean Board has what you are looking for. They offer a task board where the tasks are prioritized by moving them around, the priority tasks being on top. Interface is nice and clean and they offer other features such as integration with TFS, reports, etc.
The greenhopper plugin for JIRA has this feature. It's worked well for me ...though I'm not a big fan of JIRA in general.
http://www.atlassian.com/software/greenhopper/tour/backlog-management.jsp
Previous to this, I just used excel.
One of the best (and fastest) web UI's I've seen is on AgileZen, which supports something similar to this. Last I knew it did not have built-in integration with TFS, but it does have a REST API. It's basically a web-based, shareable Kanban board.
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I recently shifted to a new organization that follow Agile mode of development. The current project we are working has stalled due to many requirement changes that were reported recently. Since this is my first Agile assignment (after working in 4 years in non-agile environ), its a bit hard to differentiate where the problem really is.
Ruby on Rails is the platform that is being used for development. Since I can't ask a vague question, I will narrow it to this.
In agile, is it ok for the business team to relax and give requirements at will? (Some requirements given during the final sprints were altering the entire design of our app)
Or, its the development team's mistake not foreseeing the numerous possibilities of the application and not having a concrete design that could have welcomed abnormal changes?
In agile, is it ok for the business team to relax and give requirements at will? (Some requirements given during the final sprints were altering the entire design of our app)
It is OK (albeit not wise ;-)... so then an agile development team would tell them "fine guys, this would cost this amount of extra time and consequently this much schedule slippage."
If they are willing to pay the price, all's well.
If they decide that maybe the new feature is not that urgent after all, all is well too.
If they insist on including the new requirements and keeping the original schedule, that project is not agile :-(
Or, its the development team's mistake not foreseeing the numerous possibilities of the application and not having a concrete design that could have welcomed abnormal changes?
I don't think the design should be ready to welcome any kind of changes and any new features - that would only lead to bloatware, and a lot of extra work which in the end proves useless.
Agile projects should have some sort of roadmap too, so that the developers have at least a rough idea where the product is supposed to be in a year's time etc. This would allow them to plan forward and extend the design to make room for probable future changes.
If business doesn't give timely information about the roadmap (or if it proves unreliable), that is (usually - barring really unforeseen market/environment changes) business' fault. If the team did not use that info wisely, it's their fault.
Agile doesn't mean you don't have requirements or specifications or you can be free and easy with them. The business leads need to know what they want. The benefits of being agile is that if you do need to change paths, you can do that in an easier way, so you can adapt quickly.
Requirements changing will be painful no matter what your development methodology. There still has to be a strong clear plan, at least at that point in time.
Agile projects are supposed to have requirements gathering, design, analysis, coding, testing; just like the waterfall development model. However, in an agile project, the phases are supposed to cover less ground and therefore, happen faster.
I agree with Péter Török's answer, but its also the responsibility of the agile team or the agile team manager to teach the business team that the project will deliver better results each round if they postpone new requirements until the next requirements phase. Since a round is supposed to be 30 - 90 days, most new requirements can wait. The few requirements that can't wait, need to have a time and schedule cost.
Opinion of a Scrum Master here. It sounds like the business is lacking a clear knowledge of what 'agile' is, or how they implement it. Agile needs to be applied with structure, whether that be Scrum or Kanban or something similar. Too often it is a synonym for 'we don't design or document' things.
If you are meaning a team using Scrum, this would be manageable as long as the Product Owner and Scrum Master are on top of their game.
If the business team are giving requirements 'at will' that do not align, it is up to the Product Owner to take these on board, and prioritise a list of tasks prior to sprint planning. If they don't align with what has already been done, they may be estimated as large stories, due to the need for refactoring etc. by the team. It will then be up to the Product Owner to decide if it is worth proceeding with them despite the size, or working on alternative stories that align with work already done.
This would be a tough environment for the whole Scrum team to work in, but you would expect the business to see the lost value by changing direction between sprints, and hopefully align the product to a direction before too long. It certainly is not the development teams fault for not anticipating this, I would more say the Scrum Master and Product Owner need to have some serious words with the business units involved.
There needs to be a buffer between the sprint and the backlog.
The Business Team own the backlog and the prioritisation of the stories in the backlog but once the Dev team have committed to x number of stories in the sprint then it is unwise for the business team to tinker with its content. If you find this happens I would suggest shortening the length of the sprints.
If however a super urgent new requirement comes up that just cannot wait for the next sprint then another story/stories of similar points value have to be removed.
It is important that the business team manage their backlog so that in the sprint planning meeting the next set of stories are fully specked, prioritised and ready to go.
In agile, is it ok for the business team to relax and give requirements at will?
Yes, it's ok to change requirements (maybe not relax), but in our teams we will not disrupt or change the scope of the sprint unless the work currently in scope of the sprint is made redundant as a result of the new requirements added to the product backlog by the product owner (not the sprint backlog). Also note that if you commit to 100 points worth of work in a sprint, you complete 80 points and the the requirements change enough for the sprint to be disrupted then the team has still delivered 80 points that sprint based on the POs original requirements. (important when dealing with external clients)
its the development team's mistake not foreseeing the numerous possibilities of the application and not having a concrete design that could have welcomed abnormal changes?
We have a very high-level understanding of the overall features/project being worked on, however before we accept User Stories (broken downs chunks of the feature/project) we ensure that we fully understand what the Product Owner wants. If the product owner is unsure then we will ask the person whom does know. Note I am not saying that you plan out the whole project, you only nail down 1 or 2 sprints worth of user stories.
(This is how I do it, but there is no prescriptive rules, every agile rule make Agile less Agile - My opinion)
No, it is not ok to give requirements at will.
There is a general notion that business and development work together on daily basis and do that not primary in written form, but as well face to face (often to review or plan stuff). The idea is not to make too much assumptions on the future, but some and go with these.
Having done this as a coder, the only advice I can give: Setup for change. As you learn about your framework, the product side learns about the business.
If you run into problems like these: Its actually important that you fix this problem. This is what you have sprints for: Fail at something and then fix it after a retro. Doing this for a while should lead to a sane organized process how to get all the requirements at the right moment.
However: Proper engineering has hurt no-one yet as well as proper security and requirements engineering. If you need to do this despite your agile process: so be it.