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Q: How does Rally do release planning? Zach: To prepare for release planning, we have a Product Council process to involve the business in our planning cycles. The Product Council is made of stakeholders across the business and helps the Product Owners with the prioritization of backlog items. This is a key feedback loop where the business can be part of the release and roadmap planning cycles. We release every eight weeks and for each product line, there is a four meeting cycle for the Product Council. This includes a retrospective meeting, a meeting where everyone brings in their business cases for a specific feature or enhancement, a presentation of design continuums for epics, and finally, a presentation of the release backlog. The product backlog from the final presentation goes into release planning. For release planning, we follow the agenda recommended by our Services team and our Uber-ScrumMaster facilitates it. The high-level agenda includes: 1. The teams are presented, along with any other commitments individual team members might have during the release, such as vacations or upcoming time off. 2. Issues and impediments that would hamper team’s ability to make commitment to the release are presented and cleared. 3. All Product Owners present backlogs for each Scrum to each team. 4. Metrics and the definition of “done” is established and agreed upon. 5. Release date and iteration time boxes are agreed upon. 6. Teams then go off to map out the backlog against iterations in release. 7. Once the teams have met separately, all teams come back together and each team presents to the whole group to show how a story is laid out across iterations. 8. Each team identifies dependencies, conflicts or issues of how stories are mapping out across their iterations. 9. All dependencies and issues are cleared out, and stories are potentially moved around as needed. 10. Fun event for release is then decided upon. Past events have included Wii bowling, poker night and a foosball tournament. 11. The entire team commits to the release plan with a “fist of five”.* 12. Finally, a retrospective on the meeting is completed. During the release, Product Owners are working to prepare for the next release. The Product Council is where the planning and preparation that the Product Owners have completed is presented to the business. |
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Zach Nies brings close to 20 years of engineering and product development experience to Rally’s innovative products. Prior to joining Rally, Zach served as Principal Architect and Director of Systems Architecture for Level 3 Communications and founded a small start up which was quickly acquired by the publicly traded Creo, Inc, now a division of Kodak. He also served as Chief Software Architect at Quark, where he provided the overarching technological vision for the company. Zach’s product vision has won numerous industry awards, including Jolt Product Excellence awards, Seybold HotPicks and the prized MacWorld Best of Show. Zach has served on standards bodies such as the W3C's HTML working group and currently serves on the board of directors for Agile Denver.
If you are a SaaS provider or considering the move to SaaS, you should enjoy the talk, Rick's comments and the questions from the folks in the Mass Technology Council that were on the call. The recorded webinar for this call is available for viewing pleasure. My theory is that the software industry's move to SaaS and Agile are speeding up the value chain so fast that it is becoming a value cycle. As a result of that value cycle, we are seeing an increasing need to become much better at managing customer uptake and successful application of new features. If we do this well, a rapid ROI engine gets created for our customers and good things happen everywhere. I see this value cycle as a great closed-loop model that is typical of the sustainable models that will become part of all industries as the 21 Century moves along. My hope is that we leverage this model and become one of the first sustainable industries in the world. If you want to read about what we are doing to make Rally sustainable, please visit these sites. If you are more interested in the value cycle concept I turned much of this content into an article for the Sterling Report; that article is available on the Sterling Report in this month's issue.
If you are a software executive, I would encourage you to subscribe to their monthly publication of thoughtful and provocative articles. If you want a complete white paper on the topic, you can download it from the Rally Download section. If you have any comments on this article, I would love to see your comments below or on one of two forum mentioned above. |
In the end of October, I did a short, 30 minute, webinar with the 
Released just this week by the Cutter Consortium is a paper by Israel Gat, a great customer and friend. This paper makes the argument for separating the two meanings of "release" in the software world. Israel first introduced this model back in 2006 on the BMC Performance Manager team. It worked great! As a result, I coach most agile teams to start by making sure their "internal release" cadence is twice as fast at marketing, operations and the market is used to. In this way you get a release where you can gain feedback and steer the "external release" to market better. I know from the BMC days, Israel's team ran three internal releases, every 3 months, to marketing external release every 9 to 12 months. This 3X faster model is even better than the 2X model. Tell us, do you follow this model? |
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Today and tomorrow I will be both speaking at and attending the 2008 Agile Development Practices Conference in Orlando, Florida. I’ll be blogging live from the event and will provide summaries of the keynotes and the sessions I attend. If you’re attending the ADP Conference, come by and check out the Agile Contracting session that Rachel Weston and I will be giving today at 12:45 pm. There are so many great sessions at this year’s event, I wish they’d spread it out over 3 or 4 days. |
Many software development organizations work within the bounds of contractual agreements where the limitations imposed by the “Iron Triangle” of fixed timelines, budgets, and scope challenge their ability to embrace change and focus on value delivery. Agile practitioners often comment that agile contracting is a difficult problem, but proven solutions are rarely presented. Rachel Weston and Chris Spagnuolo will offer some tools they have used in their own agile contracting work to help agile practitioners deal with different contracting scenarios while promoting agile practices, protecting the development organization, and still providing value and protection to the client’s organization. Through a combined workshop and facilitated collaborative session, Rachel and Chris will present new agile contracting tools that can be added to your toolbox. You will gain a deeper understanding of the problems associated with agile contracting as well as practical solutions for dealing with contracts in an agile manner. If you're going to be attending ADP this week in Orlando, Rachel and Chris will be conducting the session "Agile Contracting" on Wednesday, November at 12:45 pm. For more information on Agile Contracting, check out EdgeHopper's Agile Contracting Section. |
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