Agile MaintenanceA Case Study

ShriKant Vashishthasvashishtha@xebia.com

http://svashishtha.wordpress.com/about/

Definition

• Software maintenance in software engineering is the modification of a software product after delivery to correct faults, to improve performance or other attributes, or to adapt the product to a modified environment (ISO/IEC 14764)

Agenda

• What is Agile Maintenance all about?

• Share learning of Xebia Application Lifecycle Management approach

A Snapshot of Traditional Maintenance

• Support team wait for issues to come• Customer communicates bugs through Manager

using Bugzila, Excel or email• Support team simulates the bug and fix it• Update the test case document and design

document and traceability matrix• Testing team tests the issue and runs regression

tests• After acceptance test, patch is deployed in the

production

Issues in Traditional Approach

No transparency in:– Estimation and time to deliver– What team does and doesn’t

• Manual tests and a lot of focus on unnecessary documentation

• Passive approach. No focus on reducing technical debt

• Demotivated team

Lifecycle of a Bug in Agile Maintenance

• A bug reported and added into product backlog• Team estimates the bug• Bug added to Sprint backlog• Developer begins the work with definition of READY

and agrees on definition of DONE• Write test case and reproduce bug• Fix the bug and run test cases as part of CI.• Ready for automated acceptance testing (Fitnesse)

Tests as Vise

Test Cases

Bug to be fixed or code to be refactored

A Snapshot of Agile Maintenance

• Bug is logged in issue tracking tool (JIRA/ScrumWorks)

• Developers estimate and Product Owner prioritizes the issues.

• Pro-active instead of Reactive– Pay off technical debt– Fixing the leaks

• Improving quality of existing software– Focus on automated testing (unit/integration/acceptance)

– Test coverage more than 85%

– Adhere to standards through automated code review

Agile Maintenance

0 5 10 15 20 25

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

400

450

500

Bugs openTotal FixedUndiscovered

Traditional Maintenance Issues Revisited

No transparency in:Estimation and time to deliverWhat team does and doesn’t

Manual tests and a lot of focus on unnecessary documentation

Passive approach. No focus on reducing technical debtDemotivated team

One Team Multiple Projects – Forces

• Maintenance is unpredictable. Sometimes you get a lot of issues, sometimes not

One Team Multiple Projects – Forces

• You may want to safeguard the project from any knowledge-base loss in case of any illness/vacations

• Human resources go waste if maintenance team doesn’t have any issues in hand

One Team Multiple Projects – The Concept

• One single consolidated list of issues from multiple projects handled in a Scrum sprint

• Proxy product-owner (PPO) from Xebia talks to product-owners, understand priority and define product backlog

• PPO then has a planning meeting with team and define Sprint backlog

• Team handles the issues of multiple projects mentioned in the sprint backlog

One Team Multiple Projects Common Sprint Backlog

One Team Multiple Projects Scrum Board and Burndown Chart

One Team Multiple Projects Advantages

• Good value of money. Comparatively smaller team handles multiple projects

• Good team spirit. Self-organizing team handles multiple projects

• Developers have a lot of choice to work and experiment with

• Knowledge base stays with the whole team instead of one single individual. It provides better results in handling critical issues as knowledge base is bigger now

Traditional Maintenance Issues Revisited Yet Again

No transparency in:Estimation and time to deliverWhat team does and doesn’t

Manual tests and a lot of focus on unnecessary documentation

Passive approach. No focus on reducing technical debt

Demotivated team

A Sprint in Maintenance Project

• A maintenance Sprint may consist:– Priority 1 bug (show-stoppers)– Priority 2 bug (major)– Priority 3 bug (low)– Priority 4 bug (improvements)– Refactoring for design improvements– Enhancement required in the functionality

• Product owner decides the priority of the issues and defines the Sprint backlog with the help of team and Scrum Master

Dealing with Priority 1 Issues in Agile Sprint - Approaches

• Estimate a part of Sprint (for instance 20%) to work on production issues

• Stop a sprint if you find Priority 1 issue and plan accordingly

• Allocate a part of team to work dedicatedly on Priority 1 issue

• Use Kanban• Follow Type C Scrum

Type C Scrum

Type A - Isolated cycles of work

Type B - Overlapping iterations

Type C – All at Once

Type C Scrum Explained

References

• Don't Let Short-Term Agile Create Long-Term Pain – Gartner

• Preparing for Agile Maintenance – Knowledge Management – Xebia Blog

• Knowledge Transfer in Agile Maintenance Projects – Xebia Blog

• Agile Maintenance – One Team Multiple Projects – Xebia Blog

• Type C Scrum Explained – Xebia Blog

• Agile Way of Documentation – Xebia Blog

• Working Effectively with Legacy Code – Michael Feathers

• The definition of READY – Xebia Blog

Questions