We’ve started using Jira and Confluence as a replacement for Xplanner (which we used for almost 2 years). Jira’s an extremely flexible issue-tracking software product which allows us to track Bugs, Projects, Sprints, and even Ticket queues (like internal email support) all in one place. We hope to be able to relate issues to one another and discover trends, bugs, and manage our software process more holistically.
The challenge has been defining the mapping between Jira’s entities and our business entities, mainly for managing the work in a given software sprint.
We’ve tried the following
Sprint: Version
Weekly Milestones: Due date
Category of change: Component
Type of task: Issue type
High-level task: Issue
Individual action in pursuit of high-level task: Sub-issue
This sprint we’re trying something different:
Sprint: Project
Weekly milestones: version
High-level task: component
Type of task: description
Individual action…: Issue
Both have their pros and cons, what I’d love to know is how others solve this and whether they might have any advice on how they’ve configured the entities in Jira, use Links, etc to manage their Agile development projects.
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We’re engaging in a spike at IntelliContact this week. Some of the projects people are investigating (none of which are sure to be finished by the end of this week):
- Mac/Yahoo Desktop Widget
- Cleanup of old files in codebase
- Consistent mail sending for messages other than broadcasts
- Firefox/Thunderbird Extension for showing message stats
- Refactoring message sending to show customers progress in sending and allow support team to ‘finish’ messages that get stuck
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Scrum as much indicates the participation of the development team(s) as it does the involvement and commitment of the ‘everyone else’. Everyone must submit innovative controversial ideas, give honest feedback, and be willing to accept success.
Last weekend the company had a second Broadwick Day and discussed all sorts of desires for employee communication and involvement in the product. The opportunity is here, and in the past week we’ve bridge the gap with some education to let everyone know about their role in Scrum.
In addition, we’ve added the role of a Story Advocate who represents a given feature during development. This provides the developers a go-to person so they don’t feel lost in the sea of people who might care about a given story. In addition, we’ve created a few mailing lists for trading ideas related to user-stories. If today’s Sprint Review is any indication, I’m looking forward to far greater involvement in the development process by any and all in the company.
The development teams also met today to re-commit to reliability as the chief deliverable. A distant second is the features which are no good, and don’t Simply Email Marketing unless they work well, all the time.
[tags]scrum, agile development, broadwick[/tags]
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A beta usually sounds like a great idea, but with the difficulties of software development–hitting deadlines, feature drift, and push to release biding time can be challenging. Both agile development and patience paid off in this case. In the preparations for our 4.0 beta, we spent an entire sprint (28 days) dealing with our internal feedback of things that were ‘non-optional’ to fix before our ultimate release. Now, we’re “waiting” a sprint for feedback to roll in.
The challenge comes in distilling the feedback and determining the value of what has been said and suggested, and what hasn’t been said. For example, if everyone talks about the size of the new icons (which are intentionally quite large) does it mean that they thought most everything else was great? Or does it mean they stopped looking after they were scared away by the large icons?
The triage process as will begin next week where we decide what of the feedback gets rolled into the software now, what goes into the product backlog for later, and what gets ‘held’ for further input, suggestion, or interest.
Meanwhile, the development teams have been hard at work playing with buzzwords like RSS and REST.
[tags]intellicontact, beta, rss, rest, scrum[/tags]
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