So we’ve been measuring story points estimate and throughput through the last 5 sprints, and they really do show approximately similar results 🙂 makes you think why do have an additional story points layer on top of the simple throughput? 🙂
Just as Vasco Duarte told 🙂
Hey guys, good news – Minsk has it’s own Atlassian User Group now, me & StiltSoft kicked out the first event, gathered 60 RSVP’s in just one week, and had an amazing time in the beautiful city of Minsk, Belarus!
Hosted an event in an awesome Eventspace.by at the old factory!
https://www.linkedin.com/embed/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6396021858935861248
And of course, a pub pic.
So we’ve survived Ufa Atlassian User Group, the very first meetup, with 17 people visiting our office to hear about jira, confluence, bitbucket and other atlassian products 🙂
We’ve discussed how Jira helped us in reflecting SkuVault development processes, and how do we keep documentation on the feature in Confluence, until it’s released, and what info do we store there.
Panel consisted of Smena.io, modulbank, MEGI, and a couple other teams 🙂 Presentation is available in Russian via this link: UfaAUG_1.
Stay tuned at https://aug.atlassian.com/ufa/ for more events in Ufa 🙂
So as you know my speciality is distributed teams 🙂 This post is about what changes does the agile communication face (and scrum in particular), when it’s adjusted to the distributed teams. This is my experience, I don’t assume this is a silver bullet, but such approach works for me for the last 5 years and proved itself to be proficient.
Let’s divide communication by types:
Let’s add another dimension: geographical distribution:
Collocated teams – everything’s perfectly fine for all three types of communication events. Teams, working in scrum, that are collocated face no issues with any of those.
Distributed teams with little difference in timezones, but still with overlapping hours. Great examples are US – Chile / Mexico. Netherlands / India.
Distributed teams with no overlapping hours (8+ hours difference).
Approaches here are:
— 3.3.1 First of all, that means that people still are participating in retrospectives and planning sessions, cause those events happen once per 2-3 weeks (thus distraction or working off-time is tolerable). However, those meetings / scrum rituals are to be performed with clear goals, and well-prepared bullets. Try to not allow offtop conversations (when someone gets into topic not relevant to current discussion). Remember, team values personal time, and no team member should suffer from poorly planned meetings.
— 3.3.2 Second, it means that daily sync (or daily standup, if you follow scrum) can be done via text, at the end of team’s working day. In order to reach more visibility, developer can share a link to the branch, that he worked on. But main goal is to have an exceprt of what team member has done during the day, that is visible for everyone (e.g. special channel on updates in telegram). Some people also propose asynchronous video messages (Dave Snowden of cognitive edge shared this experience of his with me, referring to the times he worked at IBM) – you record video message for the team, and even share the screen, if you want some visual material on your work.
— 3.3.3 Third, clarificational communication (meaning day-to-day clarification communication type) is done on demand. Meeting for such batch of clarifications is done in a compromise time, so that noone’s felt left out). The good part of that is since you don’t have to get explanations on critical and extremely complex clarifications every day – you don’t need to torture your colleagues with evening / early morning calls each day. Usually, most of the impediments are resolved via instant messaging. Please keep in mind, that requirements standardisation is a key role in these clarifications, as properly structured requirements save a lot of time while developing a feature.
— 3.3.4 And fourth, but equally important, more standards and documenting. The more info necessary you prepare for your colleagues overseas, for the questions that may rise during your off-time, the less he will be stuck. Please use common sense in how much you need to prepare. When team gets to know each other, such planning becomes much easier. And finally, efficient process always means that person doesn’t get stuck 🙂
Finally, we’re getting to my favourite ever part!
Distributed teams with no overlapping hours + language barrier! I’ve been working with those for the last three year, and here are the additional steps to make it all work efficiently.
The three common baseline rules to follow are:
At the end of the day, there are plenty examples across my experience, and blogs, how people manage to work with just on demand meetings, and create complex projects together. Those are git, atlassian and, among others – SkuVault.
Let me add an additional rule to common sense manifesto – process over redundancy. Greatly established process, understandable and rational for all parts of the team, makes it easy to track progress through transparency, keep team motivation high (for being productive) and time off undistracted.
References:
This time it was all about requirements. And we hosted the event at our cozy SkuVault office:
And that was my first-time experience of stitching video and audio 🙂
Meetup is in Russian, links are: VK / Meetup / Telegram Channel
2 weeks after we had the actual meetup, here’s the follow-up post 🙂
Topics this time:
Overall, meetup gathers momentum and creates a community. We already got bigger guys from the enterprisey-yet-more-or-less-tolerable-sector, few startups on mobile/IoT/PaaS, Banking, Digital 🙂
our links are: VK / Meetup / Telegram Channel
Me & my colleague basically decided to attend Agile Greece and Agile Turkey, and then exchange opinions and knowledge gathered there. Big advantage of my trip was Dave Snowden’s keynote, whom I wanted to catch after the speech and bore to death with silly questions 🙂
The conference (1-day conference, october 19th) kind of frustrated me, as 2/3rds of speeches were in Turkish, so I had to ditch my plan to attend certain events, and half of the time was roaming around the conference floor.
Dear people who stand behind this huge event, Agile Turkey team, please make a note next to the speech, that it may be in Turkish next time 🙂 That would be awesome!
The awesome part of that was that English-speaking crowd (mostly invited speakers) were roaming around the vortex (as Kurt Bittner joked) as well. Noone occupied their attention (possibly because of the language barrier), so I’ve turned that into 2-3-hour-long interrogations!
The Bag ‘Shift Happens. Be Agile’ has a nice slogan, but poor quality 🙂 Lots of spam from sponsors and small notebook with the pen. Felt like I’m on my local UfaDevConf conference.
I’m so glad that I’ve attended to one of Dave Snowden’s speeches! He’s an amazing guy, I love his approach to not treat metholodogies and frameworks as silver bullets, I love how he merges anthropology with IT – and I share this approach wholeheatedly (given my specialization in Applied IT in Psychology).
Keynote was called COMPLEXITY, CULTURE AND CONFUSION. Snowden described cynefin model, which I find as an universally applicable framework for sense-making. My experience with cynefin emerged when we were trying to find an already-existing model of describing various projects we had at SkuVault with Ksenia. And guess what: it fits and describes how we firefight, develop new features, research/migrate/stuff bumps as a sequence of cause-effect perfectly (and I’ll write about that soon).
Key points:
The latter part of me interacting torturing Snowden with questions on remote distributed teams with huge timezone difference, processes and estimations was indeed very satisfying! Lesson learned from almost every speaker I had time to chat with: SkuVault’s case is unique and you empirically find your own path of comfortable pace, workflow and communication.
Mr. Snowden also shed some light on asynchronous conference calls they had back at IBM, which seems like a very interesting idea to try now.
Kurt Bittner was talking about ‘5 THINGS YOU NEED TO DO TO SCALE YOUR AGILE ADOPTION’ (http://www.summit.agileturkey.org/session/5-things-you-need-to-do-to-scale-your-agile-adoption/).
Later on, I sneaked out to him while he was listening to some old Van Halen stuff, and started to ask tricky questions:
Kurt was not just helpful, he’s been my savior in the middle of turkish-only-speaking crowd 🙂 I thank him greatly for expanded answers, references to his experience and knowledge sharing!
Simon Orell told an interesting story on his experience in applying Scrum (although modified) in building gas turbines (!) in Canada (BILLION DOLLAR AGILE: APPLYING SCRUM VALUES AND PRINCIPLES TO LARGE CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS, ) – COOL!
Scott Ambler told about pragmatic way of looking at company transformation in his ‘THE DISCIPLINED AGILE ENTERPRISE‘ speech.
Small and duct-tapey resolution for the time, when you have an All -> [statusName] JIRA workflow transition.
By default, it results in the following: Default Ticket Screen shows transition from current to current status, among others. So e.g., you have an In Progress ticket, you have the transition to the very same In Progress. To avoid that, use simple conditioning for the transition:
This works in the following way:
Perform Transition (if (Status doesn't equal string('currentStatus') condition is met).
@AtlassianTeam! A good UX would be something like a checkbox, checked by default, and labelled “Don’t show transition option to same status”.
This is basically the anatomy of a distributed team, working on requirements. Key point here is that this is the process working for us, in current configuration, and it’s effective.
Disclaimer: Every organization is different: from internal structure to how it communicates with the outer world. So no workflow is a silver bullet.
Disclaimer 2: SkuVault is an ever-improving team of ~50 people, distributed across 10 timezones, 2 different versions, and serving loyal clients worldwide 24/7. Learn more about Communication in distributed teams: Messenger & Rules, or Why we ditched Scrum, in favor of Kanban in JIRA
In order to let developer work as productive as possible, management should ensure the following bits related to her work are tackled:
We moved closer to ‘no interruption’ bullet by creating on call teams, that are reacting to whatever urgent issues arise. (hållo to Kniberg’s Scrum from the Trenches 2nd edition – our own way of ‘firefighting teams’!).
However, there was no requirements preparation workflow a while back, so as the features grew more complex, more dependencies were discovered, we faced the inevitable given our product size: scope creeps, miscommunication, conclicting scenarios and inconsistency.
In order to bring all departments that were related to requirements eliciting and approval, we’ve created Product Management flow, which had to be highway to hell to better requirements.
We aimed to tackle the following areas by creating a formalized workflow:
Workflow consists of sequential steps: New Issue -> Discovery -> Sign Off -> Analysis
Ticket is created by trigger from multiple sources (marketing, services, tech, customer support forums,..). During this state, the ticket is relatively empty, providing only the request and source of the request.
Transition: In order to move the issue to the next stage, Product Owner reviews whether we’ll ever do this feature. If no – he closes it. Yes, sometime – he moves the ticket to Backlog. Yes, near-future – he moves it to Preliminary Analysis.
Step Goal: Product owner should outline Feature goal (what we need to achieve, benefits for our company and customers); describe basic business process (general 1-2 sentenses on how it works among the warehouse, since we’re a warehousing solutions company); and add that to wiki-page for that feature.
Example:
Brief feature description
Shipments are a way to track sale items that have been shipped to the customer of the Sale. A Shipment exists in SkuVault once a Tracking Number is assigned by the carrier.We want to provide an ability to connect and save tracking numbers, so that our users can have more visibility and editing right inside the app.
What do we want to achieve
Allow people that use shipping providers that don’t integrate with marketplaces as SkuVault
How it works on the warehouseGoal: Allow clients to label products with tracking number, and see shipments in relation to Sale they are attached to
- Picker gets to the QC table
- QC performing person takes the product, QCs it and labels the product with shipping label and tracking number
- The tracking number is added to the system and can be visible in relation to the sale
- User tracks the product via tracking number
Since there’s quite a stream of tickets, we let Stakeholders approve bunch of tickets at a time. Someone might say ‘Hey, isn’t that Product Owner’s responsibility, to approve?’. Well, first of all our product is big and includes different areas and domains: services, marketing, tech, operations – all having their own pursuits respectively, even if we’re moving towards the same goal.
Step Goal: approve the idea, general process and timeline for the feature to be developed.
The next step would be to gather related parties and start..
Analysis is biggest, most collaborative and complex part of the workflow. It involves:
[Business Analysts (creating User Stories)] => [collaborative efforts between BAs / UX / Developers (Wireframing)] <=> [BA / Developers (requirements adjustments, brainstorms, decomposition and clarification)].
Outcome: clear and atomized User Stories with Backend Subtasks with estimates, that give you ability to grasp and plan the feature for development. By you I mean us, Project Managers 🙂
Example: User Story – formalized and easy to grasp description, representing user activity and ability to interact with it.
Precondition: user is on Sale Info page
- Before the user clicks a Shipment Tab in the Sale Info page, the hint at the top says “Click a Shipment for Detailed Information”
- When the user clicks a Shipment line they see complete Shipment details at the top.
- list of fields for Shipments can be seen in Shipments – Plans / Technical Requirements
- They can click a button for Shipped Items or Total Cost to see detail for the items.
- If a Tracking URL exists for a shipment the user can click it to open the URL in a new tab.
- After new tab opens, user is navigated to shipping carrier website with tracking url info
- If there is not a tracking url user simple sees “Unknown” instead of the url.
- If a Label (ie: PDF) is present, the user can view it in a new tab, or download it by clicking on ‘Download’ button
Post-condition: user is able to see related Shipments info
We got strict rules for creating user stories, technical tasks, support requests and bug reports. This ensures same standards across out task-tracking system (Jira, and properly used Kanban magic) for different issue types, and allows to interpret requirements with the single possible way (which is extremely helpful :).
Right, so in a nutshell, this dramatically increased our requirements quality, and gave us ability to start analysing scope creeps properly, visibility for similar projects and better prognosis. There are things to improve, such as redundancy removal from the requirements, optimizing time spent on the workflow, better communication when estimating client requests – we’re getting closed to that!
one more thing: “oh, author, your flow is redundant for smaller features!”. You’re right, just remove sign off phase and ease analysis to accomodate simple story description for that feature / improvement ;).
Warning: don’t misinterpret scrum for agile as a whole 🙂
Around a year ago I wrote a yearly retrospect on how the workflow at SkuVault is organized, and how we set up our jira boards to work in sprints.
There was no Kanban backlog at the moment, and we used Scrum board as an improvized scrumban tool: we had the sprints, which were treated as folders to fit tickets in some time period. Classical sprints were not suitable for our workflow, I mentioned the reasons in Year Retrospective @ SkuVault. So that sprint-folder system was great, visible and allowed us to predict.
Yet, in a year period the signal that our approach (sprints as folders) doesn’t quite work appeared – there was a number of tickets migrating from sprint to sprint being rescheduled over and over.
Allow me to add a small note here on SkuVault specifics: There are different categories of work, and planning a common roadmap doesn’t quite work either: we get different priorities from different departments (QA, Product Management, Services and Angry Clients, Services and Happy and Willing to Pay clients) – so the urgent ticket scope inflates. Urgent tickets may require distraction of a developer working on some client request, which shifts the timeline for delivery. So, in a nutshell: there is no unified roadmap between different categories or depts – there is a near-term plan only, with each category having it’s own stack of priorities. Now add to this a remote team that works in collaboration across atlantic and with the timezone difference of 9-10 hours 🙂
So a question is: how to remodel the workflow to reflect the specifics?
We came up with the idea of buckets: basically those are categories of work, originating from different departments with separate product owner responsible for stack of priorities.
Last year Atlassian finally realised the scenarios teams use their product for. So, Backlog for Kanban was born out of desperate cry of thousands of PMs, Teamleads and other people who cannot develop themselves and just drag and drop tickets on the boards (/sarcasm).
The feature came out quite handy and we were able to merge our workflow with our development process IRL.
Backlog Kanban allowed us to re-evaluate a lot of backburners that were hanging out there, never getting into the sprints. It also gives us a cleaner board – cause you can store current workload apart from near-term plans, yet in the same board. It’s something you already get with scrum boards, just without sprint management.
We attacked backburners and development scope from two fronts:
This + we’ve added Buckets System, with the support of limited number of devs in the pool for each bucket. I’ll try to write a separate post on how Buckets work in our company later (spoiler alert: they work only as indicators of ticket origins, otherwise – they are kind of not really helping, as of the current state, after some teams shuffling 🙂
We’ve got two workflows – one for preparing the ticket for ready-to-be-developed state, the second is for development itself.
Each workflow has it’s own board – as you know, boards are the best ever unicorn rainbow tool to show state of the project from a particular angle.
So two boards reflect those workflows.
(Also called pre-development), managed by Product Management. Includes it’s own backlog for backburners, that we put in the shelf for some time (or close to forever); Sign Off, Detalization and Formalization, Architecture Review and finally Ready to Schedule states. Each step has a description and a format of how it should look.
The point of this board is to reflect status of every single idea that we decided to evolve into a feature, and to see the bottlenecks in Product Management workflow.
Establishing that IDEAS board was also a result of creating full Workflow for Product Management, without letting the ticket out of the IDEAS project and into main SkuVault development project, until all the details and edge cases are fleshed out (well, you caught me – there is no chance you get all 100% of edge cases, but you should try as hard as you can).
By creating standards for each step of formalizing the ticket, we’ve ensured the consistent quality of ready-for-development tickets, which ensured that they won’t be put on hold until clarification from API partner / Client / Product Management. You don’t get big stream of tasks pouring into development, but the quality of such tickets lets developers be distracted less and be more motivated, because who wants to switch context and work on something unfinished.
As I pointed out in previous posts – development board is pretty much untouched -> if it works, don’t break it 🙂
But the utilization of Kanban Backlog in JIRA came quite handy for both of the boards: you are able to have a set of tickets in the backburner, still in same project, but not wasting ginormous amounts of space on the board -> you just access all backlog via a special planning view.
While IDEAS board has a backlog with things, that should sit on the shelf for some time, Development board utilizes kanban backlog in a slightly different manner: I store optimization tickets that we need to check every couple of weeks / months there; as well as User Stories for Epics, that are still in IDEAS, that we didn’t get into development yet; or it’s a very handy way to form a pool of tasks for upcoming developers.
JIRA also support swimlanes for boards, which is utilizied by us in a manner of separating projects one from other:
Marat Kiniabulatov | Agile Tardigrade Consulting 