Agile Coach, CST
Planning and Tracking Petri Heiramo
Exercise: Initial Release Plan
• As a group, create an initial release plan for the MyBooks.com site.
• The team has estimated that it can complete • 15 story points worth of functionality in the first sprint • 25 story points in the second sprint • 30 story points indefinitely thereafter
• Business side constraints
• The beta release of the site should be up after three sprints
• The official release should be after 5 sprints • Development beyond 5 sprints is not considered
• The plan should optimize value and minimize risks
Copyright 2011 CollabNet Inc and Petri Heiramo
Questions Based on the Plan
• Is the business target of release after three sprints feasible?
• How good a feature set can the site get by official release?
Copyright 2011 CollabNet Inc and Petri Heiramo
Exercise: Charting Out the Future
• As a team, based on your initial release plan, draw value/time diagram for your project
• Draw the diagram by counting the amount of relative value (to be) delivered in each sprint
• What does the diagram look like?
• What conclusions can you draw from it?
Copyright 2011 CollabNet Inc and Petri Heiramo
Exercise: ”Surprise, Surprise”
• In the middle of the first sprint the ScrumMaster of the team delivering the MyBooks.com comes to you with bad news – three of the developers had been car-pooling and got into a serious accident. They will be out of development until sprint four. The velocity of the team will halve until they come back.
• Use replanning to evaluate the impact of the situation to your project
• What options do you have and what would actions would think the most reasonable?
Copyright 2011 CollabNet Inc and Petri Heiramo
Balance Sheet vs. Cash-Flow
Balance sheet thinking • Delay does not matter • Just in case is wise • Work in process has
value • Queues support better
decisions
Cash flow thinking • Delay creates waste • Just in time is wiser • Work in process is waste • Queues gum up the
work and slow things down
6
Mar&ne Devos
Copyright 2011 CollabNet Inc and Petri Heiramo
Converging vs. Diverging Burndown
Is this bad? Where might this be expected?
Copyright 2011 CollabNet Inc and Petri Heiramo
Burn-Ups
• Many Agile practitioners prefer burn-ups when tracking project progress
• Burndowns make more sense within sprints
• Starts from zero, just like project implementation
• Always shows velocity correctly
• Easier (and more logical) exploration and visualization of different possible scopes and levels of completeness
Copyright 2011 CollabNet Inc and Petri Heiramo
Example Burn-Up with MoSCoW
Copyright 2011 CollabNet Inc and Petri Heiramo
Other Burn-Ups
Copyright 2011 CollabNet Inc and Petri Heiramo
Alternative Diagrams
Progress by number of implemented stories
When would this work nicely?
Copyright 2011 CollabNet Inc and Petri Heiramo
Chart Tracking Work-in-Process
Work-in-Process (WIP) is considered waste as there is already expended effort in it, but it has not yet been realized as business value.
Copyright 2011 CollabNet Inc and Petri Heiramo
Burn-Up Chart with WIP
Cumulative Flow
020406080100120140160180200220240
10-Feb
17-Feb
24-Feb
2-Mar
9-Mar
16-Mar
23-Mar
30-Mar
Time
Feat
ures
Backlog Started Designed Tested Complete
Work-in-Progress (WIP) is shown as the difference between the amount of started work and the amount of complete work
Copyright 2011 CollabNet Inc and Petri Heiramo
Tracking Delivered Business Value
0
200
400
600
800
1,000
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Months
Cum
ulat
ive
Bus
ines
s Val
ue When would you start considering stopping the development?
Copyright 2011 CollabNet Inc and Petri Heiramo
Gantt Chart?
• Gantt charts are rarely/never used in adaptive iterative planning (i.e., in Agile Methods), because the content of the next iteration is decided at the last possible moment, to be as risk-driven and value-driven as possible (maximum insight / information) and future iterations are not seriously predicted.
• If you really wanted to draw one, it would look something like this:
Every sprint and every story in one would always take the full duration of the sprint
Copyright 2011 CollabNet Inc and Petri Heiramo
SM Shouldn’t Feel Constrained to Burndowns...
# of User Stories Status of Estimation
Based on this, it looks like the project should
step up on estimation...
Copyright 2011 CollabNet Inc and Petri Heiramo
...But this shows that 70% of the unestimated stories are in low priority stories.
Not so bad after all.
Copyright 2011 CollabNet Inc and Petri Heiramo
Parking-Lot Style Report on Progress
Reports like this can give top management a good view of overall progress in a large project.
Copyright 2011 CollabNet Inc and Petri Heiramo