One Yoxel

A very valid point made by the following post Is Agile Enough? (part 1)

Therein lies the key omission of Scrum (and most other agile methods): The backlog of user stories are taken as a starting point. They are not examined for their “quality”, “completeness”, “cluefulness”, budget impact, etc. The user stories are assumed “good”, and used as an “input” to the Scrum process.

(… good read …)

Does your request tracker allow you to have hierarchical requests so you could be breaking down original user stories and requirements into more detailed tasks suitable for iteration planning?

Does it track the duplicate requests so you could see the most popular requests and prioritize accordingly?

Does it allow you to specify dependencies between requests and respect those in iteration plans and project deadline estimations?

Does it allow your customers selectively (in “controlled by you” fashion) access the request records to give you more feedback regarding the content and priorities?

Check out a demo account at www.yoxel.com to see how Yoxel request tracking system can help you do all that within agile environment.

The next several posts I intend to dedicate to covering release planning and release/project tracking. In agile terms, planning and execution of an “iteration/sprint”. Expect me to talk about YOXEL SW (our solution for software product management) quite a bit although I hope the details of the described process will still be useful in general, no matter which tools you prefer.

Release, Incremental Release, Iteration, Sprint

Some methodologies and tools like to talk about releases (longer term plan) and multiple iterations (short incremental chunks of work) within each of the releases. My terminology is simplified. Essentially I will use the terms release, incremental release, iteration, and sprint interchangeably. You start an agile incremental release and work on it for a month (call it an iteration or a sprint). Or you start a waterfall release, plan it for months and work on it for another year (call it a production release or whatever). So I will be using term ‘release’ and ‘incremental release’ and it will mean ‘iteration’ and ’sprint’ too .

Backlog

What I mean by backlog may differ slightly from what you think of it. My definition is very practical, the backlog is all requests in your request tracking database. The request tracker for our users is either Yoxel’s native tracker or a combination of an external bug-tracker (Bugzilla/Mantis/GNATS/…) and Yoxel’s. We understand that many teams out there already have their flows built around their favorite bug-trackers so we designed YOXEL SW to be able to connect to your existing bug-tracker and synchronize with it as often as you desire. It is up to you whether you continue filing all requests in your Bugzilla, switch completely to Yoxel, or separate bugs and simple enhancement requests from other classes of requests (requirements, feature request, customer support request) to file them in different systems. Your choice! In the end, Yoxel database contains all your requests: synchronized copies from your bug-tracker plus native ones, filed directly.

You can probably tell by now that my religion is to keep all requests (bugs, enhancements, new development, features,…) in one centralized database, even requirements and support tickets from your customers. Once you have done that, it is all about defining the right work flows for each class of requests to make it equally convenient for developers, product managers, and other involved stakeholders. Developers, support team, product managers even some of your expert customers file their requests into this centralized database where later the requests can be refined and acted upon. Especially if your system has hierarchical capability you can always break down requirements into a number of meaningful enhancement sub-requests, fill each of those with functional details, and have them ready for actual implementation.

Prioritized Backlog

It is better if your backlog is prioritized! One could think of using some complex ROI based functions (derived from win/loss analysis, customer questionnaires, risk assessments, … ) that rank all your requests in the backlog but Yoxel SW is pretty simple in this regard at the moment. All we use is ‘customer urgency’. Forget about so widely used and IMHO quite often confusing ’severity and priority P1,2,3′. Just urgency as expressed by your customer: critical, high, medium, low. [I actually think that having all the data to apply the ROI based functions is good but I believe that the functions should be dynamic, meaning, they should order your backlog items based on the current focus of your incremental release/iteration. Sometimes your release is focused on a particular customer, sometimes on robustness of the software, sometimes on adding new functionality; the same order in the backlog does not work for all the situations.] Anyway, for now we prefer for product managers and stakeholders involved in the release planning process (which I will discuss in my next post) to define the exact content of the release based on their experiences and knowledge, backlog priorities are only used to generate preliminary release plans, to kick off the actual planning session. BTW, requests with urgency ‘critical’ are handled in a completely different manner, see my previous post about it Urgent vs. Planned.

Preliminary release plan

Once you have a prioritized backlog you need to take a chunk of the most important requests and start working on those, right? Well, may be not that simple. I agree though in one, you need to take a chunk to begin with, and lets call that chunk our preliminary release plan. Then, I believe, you want to collaborate with your team of stakeholders, prioritize the list of requests in the plan further, refine some of the items, make sure you have not missed anything, estimate and do whole lot of other interesting things. I will continue this thought in my next post …

YOXEL SW actually tries to simplify the generation of the preliminary plan for you, to make it a meaningful start point. Usually it is one release owner/product manager/scrum master who starts the release planning session. He/She simply fills out a simple form that drives an automatic plan generator. In that form he/she specifies a list of release members who will be collaborating and shaping up the final plan, objectives and goals of the release to keep all the members on the same page, and a requests filter. Depending on your release goals you may not want to grab the top N items from the backlog, instead you may want to be more selective (enhancements only, or requests related to these few customers only, or some other subset of the requests). Also the release owner specifies perfect fix/test time per request (based on your previous experience), % of time your team usually spends on critical/unscheduled/unexpected work (kind of backward way of specifying team velocity), and your desired deadline (for agile teams would probably be 2weeks-1month away). It is not very important to be accurate with all these parameters at this point (you can always refine the plan later).

The generator then makes an “educated guess” of how many requests your team can handle (and it knows quite a bit about your team too from the assignees and product definitions in the request tracker), given the deadline, and grabs that number of the requests from your backlog, after having applied the filter. It also informs all the release members that a new release planning session has started, with the specified goals, inviting them to take part in the planning session.

Your preliminary release plan is ready. From here on you are in the release planning mode, collaborating with all the release members to form the final plan that can then be used to drive your development/sprint/iteration.

Compare it with what you are doing today to generate the preliminary plan.

1. Manually examine your bug-tracker for any important enhancement requests already filed
2. Create Excel table with those enhancements plus potential new features
3. Give it all preliminary priority
4. Oh, yes, do not forget to include some important bugs
5. And keep it all in Excel for now
6. …. more manual steps?

Agile business, Agile product, Agile team.

The topic of applying agile methodologies to your business processes seems to have become quite popular these days. The benefits of becoming agile are pretty attractive for software companies and yet many of them still do not clearly understand how they could make a smooth transition and whether this “agile” thing really works. I believe part of the confusion is owing to the fact that most of the information and discussions on this topic focus on software development aspect and forget that the companies are businesses and there is a little more to creating a great product than just code development. I prefer to look at the problem of becoming more agile and adaptive from a slightly higher level, product management (PM) level. PM for me is about product development and coordination of multiple teams and processes (development, customer support, marketing, management, sales). In my opinion agile product management (and product development of cause as its essential part) is what you should consider.

Re-visiting, re-fining and re-prioritizing product requirements, plus soliciting, and digesting customer feedback, for each development iteration, are the key ideas of the agile methodologies. In smaller companies your development team may be the one in charge of all of those functions but as your company grows you will most probably have more specialized roles and teams responsible for market requirement and customer feedback management (product managers, technical marketing, professional services, sales engineering …). Hence the agility of your whole business will depend on how well these different teams can interact with each other and especially with the development team to facilitate relevant development iterations and produce what your customers expect. This collaborative work of multiple teams is nothing else but your product management process. And in my opinion it is a very challenging task to make this process efficient and agile. Unfortunately just a white board and story cards may not be enough.

I strongly believe your company will benefit if it finds an appropriate tool to support its PM process. Ideally you will want to have a magic system that engages your development team, your product managers, your support team, and even customers to enable better collaboration, coordination, and reporting. Such a system should be as attractive to the development folks as to product managers, marketing, sales and management. Sure, it could be several systems but then they had better be all integrating and collaborating well with each other. As of today I do not really know of any standard open interfaces/frameworks allowing different vendors to create product management solutions that could smoothly interact and collaborate with each other (Eclipse may be?), so the choice is still usually a one vendor solution, or better (my own preference) an open source solution.

“Hybrid Agile” methodologies and the tools.

Most of the companies that are serious about their business are already agile. They have figured out a certain process that works well for them (with whatever tools they could find). Such companies may not follow strict SCRUM, or strict XP but they are agile. A hybrid agile methodology is often a real life situation.

For me it is always interesting to learn what kind of tools software companies use in support of their hybrid agile approaches. I like to talk to product managers of small/mid-size software companies and ask them about their current methods and tools: how they manage and prioritize product requirements and backlog of requests; how they plan, estimate and resource allocate/balance for each iteration; how they track project implementation and testing; how they gather customer feedback. In order to substantiate my statement that you should look for better tools let me give you a few examples here of what the companies use currently; you will see that the situation could be better.

Company A:
—————-
MS Word and Excel for requirements/prioritization
Wikis for collaborative documentation
Jira for project planning/tracking
Jira for bugs and tasks tracking

Company B:
—————-
MS Excel for requirements/prioritization
MS Excel and sketching tasks/stories on white boards for planning/tracking
Scrum plugin for MS Visual Studio Team System

Company C:
————-
MS Excel for requirements/prioritization
X-Planner and Wikis as the collaboration workspace
X-Planner for project planning/tracking
Bugzilla for backlog/bugs and task tracking

Company D:
————-
Shared Google spreadsheet for requirements/prioritization
Omniplan for resource allocation, and project planning/tracking
FogBugz for backlog/bugs and task tracking

Company E,F,G,H,…
———————-
MS Excel/salesforce.com for requirements/prioritization
MS Project/basecamphq.com/Excel for resource allocation, project planning/tracking
Bugzilla/Jira/Mantis/GNATS for task tracking

Amazingly enough there is abundance of agile companies that simply use Bugzilla/Mantis/GNATS and MS Excel. It is probably explained by popularity of the MS Excel and open-source bug-trackers (thousands of development teams have standardized their processes on those), lack of knowledge about better alternatives, and the fact that smaller companies tend to spend less money on tools in this area. My personal observations are that although these companies managed to stay agile their current processes could still be improved and accelerated. A number of new generation tools could help them in that:

1. Smaller teams tend to do fine with just Wikis but in other cases it seems like more than two or three different tools have to be used to support the process properly. A bug-tracker (from R&D side) seems to always be in the picture and a requirements management tool (from PM side, usually Excel) also. Plus various project management, resource allocation, time tracking tools. My problem with this is the lack of integration hence a lot of manual work to keep all the tools synchronized plus perhaps burden on IT to support all those tools and integrate them:
   • Spreadsheet tool (except Google’s) is not a collaborative environment.
   • Sooner or later PM has to manually transfer the data from his spreadsheet to a bug-tracker and also to a project manager/time tracker.
   • Every now and then PM has to update project status manually based on the status of individual tasks from the bug-tracker.
   • Real-time detailed status of projects is not readily available
2. The reporting capabilities are pretty poor in all these examples or achieved at the expense of significant manual work. Reporting can be extremely important for keeping your management and team members updated and informed. Good paper reports can actually be almost as effective as white boards and story cards during your agile team meetings.
3. A few companies that have been more flexible and also educated on the available new generation tools for agile methodologies have made their transition to X-planner, MS team SCRUM plugin, RallyDev or VersionOne. Again, that is mostly to support agile development process. This is great! Although I still have a few concerns: these tools enforce a certain agile methodology (SCRUM or XP), new terminology, and may require significant ramp-up/learning time from your development team whereas you may want to do an agile variation of your own that does not disturb your current team specifics so much. Just think how Mozilla, Apache, MySQL, Eclipse projects would react if you suggested to them to abandon their Bugzillas and Mantises and switch to another “agile” request-tracker. The same is true for almost any software company.
4. Customer feedback is usually managed by product managers, professional services and support organizations. Among the companies I talk to I do not see much adoption of customer feedback management tools although there are some interesting tools out there. IdeaScope seems to be one of them! Its advertised most valuable use seems to be mostly in combination with Featureplan product which may be an overkill for a smaller company, but still. (Featureplan, by the way, also enforces a certain pragmatic framework.)

Any recommendations?

There are some interesting new generation tools designed specifically to support agile methodologies. And yet the real challenge is for the companies that do not feel comfortable with radical changes of their current tooling or are reluctant to abandon their bug-trackers. There are fewer options for these companies (although I may be wrong).

• Smaller co-located teams probably will not need any specific tools. Wikis and any bug-tracker will be enough. Think about your future though, if you are growing, a day may come when your wiki/bug-tracker environment is not enough to accommodate your team/business dynamics.
• If your team is bigger, especially if it is distributed, and wants to do a strict SCRUM/XP and you can afford a significant change to your current processes, you should probably go with some of these new tools: RallyDev, VersionOne, X-Planner. They are great! Pick one that addresses your product managers’ and other non-developer’s needs also.
• The teams that want to transition to or improve the support for their existing agile processes but are not comfortable with radical changes, in my opinion should look for a tool that integrates with their Bugzilla, Mantis, GNATS, Retrospectiva, Jira, … and is designed to be a tool for product managers too. Make sure it has the release/iteration manager that allows you to plan and track your iterations and derive useful statistics.

Yoxel Systems

The project I am involved with, Yoxel Systems , should be a really good fit for the last category mentioned above where you really care about smooth transition or are looking to support your hybrid “agile” approach. We try to create a flexible solution for product managers, field support, and developers that can accommodate a variety of agile methodologies, so Yoxel is also an alternative to RallyDev, VersionOne, X-Planner. On top of the release/iteration management aspect Yoxel tries to be very customer focused providing customer support, product knowledge management, and lightweight CRM capabilities too, all integrated into one product management system.

(Please try our demo accounts at http://yoxel.com)

Enjoy!