Tag Archives: Product Owner

Agile, Project Management, SDLC, Software Development, Technology

Transitioning from Agile, Iterative Project Initiatives to Production Support, DevOps

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Going from dedicated project-funded efforts using Agile and Scrum methodologies, such as Sprint Planning, Backlog Refinement, Sprint Close Demos, etc., to a production support process leveraging the DevOps (Development and Operations) model requires a transition path to be successful.

People, Processes, and Technology need to shift along with this change in the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) mandated by management.

Commitment v. “Pulling from the Backlog” Mindset

Agile Teams Leveraging Scrum Ceremonies

At the foundation of Agile with the application of Scrum ceremonies is a commitment from the team and individuals on the team to implement User Stories within an agreed cadence, a Sprint (e.g., two weeks). The product owner and the implementation team articulate what is required to implement the story, produce a collective, relative effort estimate in the form of Story Points, and agree to complete the set of user stories within a given sprint cadence. For each user story, the “Definition of Done” is clearly articulated in the form of “Acceptance Criteria”, and this criteria is used as a guidepost for software development and quality assurance.

As an Agile, Scrum team, you may view your product backlog differently than you would in a DevOps, Development, and Operational model. Scrum teams are focused on the day-to-day work toward implementing user stories and making progress on user stories and Bugs to fulfill their commitments for the current Sprint. Scrum teams are typically focused on implementing work items or removing blockers and may discuss these activities each day during a Daily Scrum or “Daily Standup.”

DevOps – Pull from the Backlog

Unlike Scrum teams, who set up sessions to measure progress in a particular cadence, e.g., two-week sprints with Sprint Planning and Sprint Close sessions, DevOps team members pull from the backlog as their bandwidth becomes available. The [Business] Product Owner and the DevOps team may have some regular or ADHOC sessions for Backlog Grooming / Refinement to ensure the user stories are ready for implementation and prioritized appropriately.

The Product Owner and DevOps team periodically perform Backlog Refinement sessions to make sure the prioritized User Stories have all of the necessary elements to implement the user story. During these Product Backlog Refinement sessions, team members perform a relative effort estimation of each user story. How long will it take to implement the user story? Each team member may indicate how much effort they feel will be needed to implement the product backlog item (a.k.a. User Story). See articles on poker planning, a collective, relative, effort estimation process/tool that standardize how to perform these estimations.

When one of the DevOps team members has the bandwidth to take on one of the stories, they pull it off the backlog and move it to the Board for implementation. [Kanban] Boards have an agreed workflow to allow DevOps team members to move items through the agreed software development lifecycle (SDLC).

Production Critical Alerts Take Precedence

In this process, there is no commitment or agreement when the team member will finish their work on the user story, i.e., complete by Sprint Close cadence. Story Points, or Product Backlog, Size Estimation give the individual and the team an indication of how long the Product Backlog Item (PBI) might take to implement. Unfortunately, the (Development / Operations) DevOps team member’s responsibility stretches beyond “new” work from the Product Backlog. Operations duties, such as reacting to critical application monitoring alerts from the production environment, may take higher precedence.

Where Am I?!?

DevOps team members may have frequent disruptions in their work from production issues and have their heads spinning, switching back and forth from implementing PBIs to handling ADHOC issues from production applications. The Kanban board is one way to get everyone back on the same page with the changes in progress. At a glance, we can visualize the progress of implementing user stories, bugs, and associated tasks on the Kanban board.

Kanban board
Kanban board

Anatomy of a Great Kanban Board

Moving from a Scrum team to a DevOps team, you may, as an individual, be looking at the Kanban board from time to time, such as when you have bandwidth available to work on Bugs or Product Owner prioritized User Stories. The following does not assume your project team transitioned to a DevOps model or a separate DevOps team took over,

Columns Match your DevOps, SDLC Workflow

Regardless of who is doing the work, how the work is being done moving forward is essential to map out the software development lifecycle (SDLC) under DevOps constraints. The DevOps team will establish the states for each work item as they apply to the DevOps team. For example, there may not be QA team members, but there would be a testing process to verify the implementation of a Bug fix or User Story.

However, in a Scrum team going from “Dev Complete” to “Testing Complete” may require a “Release Management” phase, i.e. promoting code from DEV to TEST environments. On a Scrum team, between “Dev Complete” and “Testing Complete”, there may have been a phase to run a cursory or “smoke test” before going to “QA Approved.” This alternate DevOps SDLC process may not require a smoke test anymore due to the team’s composition. Long story short, it’s essential to get your process agreed to and implemented on the DevOps team Kanban board. Each column has a state, and the idea is to move Product Backlog Items (PBIs) from left to right and terminate at the “Closed” status.

Identifying and Removing Blockers

It’s all about keeping the momentum forward. If we cannot work on a Bug or User Story because we are Blocked for any reason, that is time wasted without progress. As a team, we should always be on the lookout for Blocking Issues that prevent our teammates or us from moving forward. Once identified, we aggressively look for ways to unblock ourselves or our teammates. The Kanban Board typically has a “Blocked” status column, so it’s very visible to the team once the PBI is indicated to be Blocked. Of course, the “Blocked” identification and remediation process is not limited to DevOps or Scrum teams.

The HOV Lane for Critical Production Issues

In some cases, changes to production code or configuration need to be dealt with by the DevOps team. These production issues that require “priority treatment”, e.g. Severity = Critical, may go in a “swimlane” on the Kanban board, which clearly articulates these Product Backlog Items (PBIs) are the top priority for the team (see figure above).

Definition of Done – Acceptance Criteria

As in Scrum ceremonies, the “Definition of Done” should be clearly articulated in the PBIs (i.e. user stories and Bugs). Sometimes the Definition of Done fits well in the “Acceptance Criteria” field of the PBI, i.e. these are the following things that need to appear in the code or surface on the UI to be accepted as “Closed” or “Done”.

Work in Progress (WIP) Limits

On some teams, there is a concern about “workflow blockage” at any given state in the SDLC process. For example, there could be 20 PBIs in the “In Progress” state for three DevOps team members. This could be identified as excessive and trying to do too much simultaneously. It also may contribute to confusion on the current state of any given work item. Some Kanban Board tools allow you to apply WIP limits so you cannot add more work items to a given status on the board. It also could be done using a standard paper Kanban board.

Product Documentation

If two separate teams are transitioning the work, documentation may be vital in the successful transition and ongoing product maintenance. Many agile teams are lighter on documentation and trust the product speaks for itself. Best case, user stories have been created that cover the team producing/updating a functional specification doc and a wireframe collection. The most probable situation is we have a pristine set of Features and associated User Stories. Each of the User Stories clearly articulates a description and, most importantly, “Acceptance Criteria.” that may be used for the development and validation of the functionality of the system. User Stories can be derived for knowledge transfer documentation.

Always Room to Improve – Retrospective

Although a Retrospective session is typically attributed to a Scrum ceremony, you don’t have to be engaged in Scrum activities to perform a retrospective. Depending upon the DevOps Team composition, it could be a collective, grassroots suggestion, or the team DevOps manager can recommend and facilitate the session. It would be better if a team peer fulfills the role of facilitator, and some retrospective tools allow anonymous feedback.

Good luck on your journey, and if you have any questions, please reach out.

Agile, Business, Development, Project Management, SDLC, Technology

Agile Manifesto – Personal Reflection

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Individuals and Interactions over Process and Tools

Stereotypical software developers are introverts, heads down, coding. Articulating where they are in the development lifecycle sometimes heavily relies upon tools for measuring progress such as JIRA, Product Backlog status of User Stories, e.g. “In Progress” with an Effort estimation of 3.

“Blocked” User Stories may require the implementation team to “break out of their shell” and work with their teammates to “unblock” Product Backlog items. It breaks people out of their comfort zone. We need to discuss options and opportunities for removing blockers. “All for One, and One for all”

Working Product over Comprehensive Documentation

Over a decade or so ago, the measure of my merit was the complete test coverage of requirements for software implementation. Back then I was a QA lead, and my focus was to make sure all use cases for the software under development had complete test coverage.

Requirements changes from our business through our business analysts must be vetted with the QA team so use cases/test cases must be updated to ensure coverage. Sometimes a dependency of one requirement had a ripple effect throughout the software, so lots of documentation updates were required. Milestone dates were in many cases fixed, so teams were squeezed to do more with less time.

Flash forward to today, and leveraging Agile principles, I breathe a slight sigh of relief. Iterating product delivery via sprints every 2 weeks is supremely better than attempting to traverse updates to Business Requirements Documents (BRD), and technical specs. User Stories in a Backlog are much more succinct, and in some cases, a bit more abstract leaving functionality open to some level of ambiguity and interpretation.

Sprint Close scrum ceremonies every two weeks with our Product Owner, the central mouthpiece for the definition of the software product helps define the path forward. Did we get it right? Where do we need to make changes? There is no substitute for an evolving product and accompanying dialog with our Product Owner.

Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation

Both sides of the aisle seem to agree, building a solution with iterative input from the customer enables the product vision to be realized far better than without frequent touchpoints.

Statements of Work (SoW) to engage 3rd party solutions integrators (SI) may be abstract in some way. Holding vendors accountable for loosely formed requirements is tenuous at best. Quibbling about he said, she said is a waste of time.

Fail fast, engage regularly and often with our [Business] Product Owner enables us to collaborate on a working solution. The focus is on the evolving product vision and not the paper trail.

Responding to Change over Following a Plan

A “last-minute” change request? It could push back our timelines and accompanying milestones. Dates can’t change, and teams need to absorb the changes, i.e. nights and weekends. Responding to incremental changes at a regular cadence is a sustainable life cycle.

Agile, Business, Development, Software Development, Technology, Work

Agile’s Watergate

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A relic of the Waterfall model is the construct of a “gate” process. In order for a project to achieve a milestone, the project/solution would need to achieve certain criteria that would allow it to go to the next phase of the project. For example, going from solidifying requirements in a Business Requirements Doc (BRD) to the software implementation phase.

In Agile, we leverage the Product Owner (PO) and the Product Backlog to determine what gets done and when. A Product Backlog item (PBI) may cover the full lifecycle of a Feature, from requirements to implementation. The Product Owner dictates acceptance of the PBI based on the status/transparency of the Backlog, such as the criticality of the Bugs linked to the PBI. Product quality and implemented functionality are transparent to the PO, who will determine the next steps such as release the software, and/or go through another iteration/sprint. Iterations are a defined cadence agreed to by the implementation team and the Product owner, typically, 2-week sprints.

Agile, Hybrid Environments: Opportunities for Synergy

Epics, Features, Product Backlog Items, and Tasks are object types in a Backlog that enable the PO and the team to link objects and plan over multiple sprints. Epics or Themes of Sprints are “high level”, potentially strategic initiatives. Features roll up into Epics as a part of several sprints. Either Epics or Features may be high enough level to link to Psydo Project Milestones for a product roadmap of deliverables, and solicitation outside the team.

Aggregation of Product Backlog Items, Effort Estimations, roll up into Features, and then up into Epics, which roughly equate to milestone timelines.

The “Definition of Done” (DoD) for a Product Backlog Item may require 0 outstanding Bugs with the severity of “Critical” linked to this PBI. The DoD criteria could be analogous to a traditional Quality Assurance gate.

Tasks that are production rollout activities, without a project plan, should be planned for in future sprints, akin to estimating when items may be completed in the proper sequence. Some of the Tasks may be placed conservatively in “early” sprints and may require items to be “pushed forward” after each of the iterations.