Joint Release and Business Iteration Planning in a Large Scale Agile Project – F-Secure's experience

Protecting the irreplaceable | f-secure.com

Joint Release and Business Iteration Planning in a Large Scale Agile Project – F-Secure’s experience

Gabor GunyhoLean Change Agent

2010-09-17

About F-Secure

• Company

• Founded in 1988, listed on NASDAQ OMX Helsinki, market cap ca 340m€

• Headquartered in Helsinki, 18 country offices, presence in more than 100 countries

• 840+ people, 300+ in R&D, 5 offices in 4 countries, Agile transformation since 2003

• Products and Services

• Online Security: Anti-malware, e-mail filter, Browsing Protection, Parental Control

• Content Protection: Online Backup, Anti-theft

• Online Storage and Services: Storage Platform, Sharing, Social Media Access

• Multiple OS platforms (Win, Mac, Linux, mobile), 20+ language versions

• Customers

• Consumers (retail, reseller, e-store), millions of homes

• Operators, world leader with 200+ operator partners

• Corporate

© F-Secure Public2010-09-172

About the project #1

• Major new product

• significant changes in some business models, architecture and

development approach i.e.,

new Release and Business Iteration Planning method *)

• Planning Scope: Business Iteration (BI) = 90 days (original)

• BI Planning Events: first a 3-day workshop then 2 days

• Attendants: ~120 (ca 13-14 teams)

• Venue: Exhibition hall

• Facilitator: originally Dean Leffingwell and the internal Continuous

Improvement Support (CIS) team, later CIS team only

• Events conducted so far: all together 5 since December 2009

*) based on Dean Leffingwell’s model the “Agile Release Train”

© F-Secure Public2010-09-173

About the project #2

• Legacy product with less development effort

• significant changes in team setup and development approach i.e.,

new Release and Business Iteration Planning method

• Planning Scope: Business Iteration (BI) = 60 days

• BI Planning Events: 2-day workshops

• Attendants: ~16 to 20 (2 to 3 teams)

• Venue: conference room in the office

• Facilitator: internal Continuous Improvement Support (CIS) team

• Events conducted so far: 2 since June 2010

© F-Secure Public2010-09-174

Why planning?

“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Plans change very easily. Worldly affairs do not always go according to a plan

and orders have to change rapidly in response to a change in circumstances.

If one sticks to the idea that once set, a plan should not be changed, a

business cannot exist for long.”

Taiichi Ohno

© F-Secure Public2010-09-175

0

100

Probability of

meeting date

(%)

Time

Why joint Business Iteration planning sessions?

“

• We need to plan a large iteration with many teams, much

complexity, and lots of dependencies

• Share information across the whole project

• Deal with risks

• Deal with impediments

• Find and deal with dependencies

• Align teams to a common objective

© F-Secure Public2010-09-176

“We need to improve the way how we manage our requirements, and especially

how we create concept (release) plans and link longer term architecture into our

short term plans“ Pirkka Palomäki, CTO

© F-Secure Public2010-09-177

“Value Items” – layers of abstraction in content

•Epics are broader, long-term things,

typically do not fit in a release

•Features do not fit in an iteration

• but they do fit in a release

•Stories must be small enough to fit into

an iteration

•Tasks are not “Value Items” per se

• they belong to the iteration Backlog

Fea

ture

Sto

ryTask

Solu

tion B

L

Itera

tio

n

BL

Epic

Sol/Tech

Roadm

ap

Project Cadence – layers of abstraction in time

• Fixed iteration length for all teams (2 weeks)

• Iterations are synchronized

• Planning and demo days and

internal releases are synchronized

• Business Iteration: 60 days

• Release to Manufacturing (eg) in 2, 3 or 4 BIs

© F-Secure Public2010-09-178

I1 I2 I3 I4

2w

Beta1

B

I

P

B

I

PI5 I6 I7 I8

Beta2

B

I

PI9 I10 I11 I12

RTM

Preparing for the Business Iteration Planning event

Planning scope and context, i.e., business and tech vision

High level BI content: epics and features (in priority order)

Project cadence, i.e., BI and iteration length, schedule, events (planning and demo days) and beta releases

Team setup and teams’ availability for the planning event (collocated)

Teams’ capability for agile planning and Team’s capacity

Commitment and availability of business owners, product owners, technology owners and other key stakeholders

Tooling capabilities, i.e., engineering environment and backlog tooling

Facilitation for the planning event

Event venue and logistics (place, furnishing, AV, equipment, catering etc)

© F-Secure Public2010-09-179

Agenda for the joint BI planning event, day 1

• Introduction (30min)

• Project setup (15min)

• Visions for (2,5h)

• Business/content

• Architecture

• User eXperience and UI

• Engineering practices

• Confidence vote on the input

• Planning process intro (30min)

• Planning (4h) – team breakout sessions

• Scrum-of-Scrums (SoS) and Architecture SoS alternating in every hour,

includes risk and issue handling

• Draft Plan review (30 min)

© F-Secure Public2010-09-1710

Agenda for the joint BI planning event, day 2

• Status check (15 min)

• Planning (4-5h) – team breakout sessions

• Scrum-of-Scrums (SoS)

and Architecture SoS

as before

• Final plan review (1,5h)

• Confidence vote

(5 minutes “thumb voting”)

• Retrospective

© F-Secure Public2010-09-1711

Building the Business Iteration Plan

• Get team capacity per iteration

• in team’s own unit

• Identify Stories/Backlog Items

• Derive stories from Features to meet vision/objectives

• Estimate stories

• Split any story bigger than X

• Identify and discuss interdependencies

• Other teams, IT, UX, etc

• Check regularly on coverage of features by the stories

• Load stories on your sprints until you run out of capacity

• Negotiate/gain agreement/ restate BI objectives for your team

• Identify impediments and risks

• Identify any hard dates

• Prepare to present your plan

• Help-desk is there for the teams:

• User experience experts, business managers, architects, etc

© F-Secure Public2010-09-1712

Considerations in Building the Plan

• Include bug-fixing time and maintenance load

• Include effort for releasing

(eg beta release)

• Include holidays, training and

company events (if any)

• Include some realistic

allocation for surprises

• Identify and include effort for

• Infrastructure build-up

Note: shared infra build-up

needs to track ahead

• Improvement ideas

• Architectural issues

• Automated Testing

• Non-functional Requirements

© F-Secure Public2010-09-1713

As a result the teams will have

• Features and all other work broken down to stories

• Allocated the stories to iterations within capacity.

© F-Secure Public2010-09-1714

And the whole project will have

• Master wall that shows which team works on which

feature in which iteration

• List of identified risks and impediments

• ROAMed - Resolved, Owned, Accepted, Mitigated

© F-Secure Public2010-09-1715

Conclusions

• Business Iteration for steering in mid-term time scale

• Higher levels of abstraction in the “Value item” hierarchy

• Planning for the Business Iteration with the features and epics

• For both larger (13-14 teams) and smaller (2-3 teams) settings

Better visibility and steerability for business management

• External facilitation is a must, start with an experienced expert

• Evolve the method as you go, eg

• Scrum-of-Scrums within the planning, including continuous risk, dependency and impediment handling

• Stakeholder help-desk

• Master wall and feature coverage tracking, etc

© F-Secure Public2010-09-1716

Questions?© F-Secure Public2010-09-1717