APO Development Reporting
Findings & recommendations
Goals
- Understand the work & prioritise
- Understand how work is progressing
- Understand areas for improvement
Findings
Planning
-
Feature planning
Currently this entails Karl, Somit, Jason/Jess, BAs, SMEs and PMs discussing each feature and user story. It does not include defining or planning releases.
-
Sprint planning
Planning for the next 2 weeks of work. The whole development group participates.
ATLAS release train
Flat list of features with no
attempt to plan releases.
Communication
-
Team communicating well internally
Through scrum activities and adhoc discussions during the day.
-
No artefact to communicate goals
Team works on what is in the sprint with no goal in mind beyond the current 2 weeks.
-
No artefact to communicate priority
Work is either in sprint or not. Team is not aware of priorities beyond this.
- No way to collaborate on the above with stakeholders
There is no shared way to understand or communicate on goals or priorities.
Tools
-
The tools available are appropriate
TFS has sophisticated reporting capabilities.
-
Team managing for their own needs
Development team is able to track their own progress through kanban boards and iteration metadata.
-
Team doesn't have permissions to setup optimally
Team is unable to configure basic critical parts of TFS - for example options available in the State field.
State field issues
Unable to map State field value
to board column
Manual handling
Have to double handle or workaround in other ways because basic configuration can't be setup.
Inconsistent usage
Historically teams have adopted their own ways of using the tools. This makes reporting across teams very difficult.
Recommendations
Planning
-
Story mapping
Epic level (2-3 month view)
Feature planning activities can adopt story mapping to allow them to define increments across features. This will make vision and priority much easier to communicate.
Sprint level (next increment)
Similarly teams can use story mapping to plan and communicate their work visually at a lower level.
To understand the work & prioritise
Story mapping is a powerful technique to plan and communicate work, priorities and increments (releases).
Communication
-
Story mapping
Will make it easy to track against planned increments.
-
Visualise current, upcoming work
Can be seen through TFS and story map.
-
Align with Digital tools (TFS)
The work planned through story mapping or other activity will be tagged appropriately in TFS so it can be viewed and reported on using automated tools.
To understand progress
Tools
- VSTS is fit-for-purpose
- Needs to be setup right
- Access or support to do this is needed
- Facilitates automated reporting
To understand areas to improve
To understand progress
By planning better, we will work on what is important and ultimately get more high quality work done at a lower cost.
Tools help us see how we are
performing and adapt and improve
TFS comes with Cumulative Flow diagrams out of the box. This is widely accepted as the most effective way to visualise team performance in Agile development.