Disciplined Agile

For a long time now we’ve been applying what’s often called rolling wave planning with our clients. Rolling wave planning is applied in several areas of the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit, including release planning by a delivery team, technology roadmapping, and product roadmapping to name a few. This article explores how to apply rolling wave planning in a pragmatic manner to product roadmaps.

An important aspect of product management is to develop and evolve an overall business vision, an important part of which is your organization’s product roadmap. This is sometimes called a “multiple product roadmap” or “product offerings roadmap” although more commonly just a “product roadmap.” This roadmap indicates upcoming product releases (or application releases for non-product companies), potential product ideas, and the retirement of any products. The goal is to manage customer expectations regarding your product portfolio.

An example of a product roadmap for a fictitious company is depicted in Figure 1 below. For product planning this company’s very near term (green) is a three month, rolling period. In this case we’re seeing the roadmap as of September 2016. For the very near-term the expected release dates of each product are indicated. This company has chosen to also do this for some, but not all, of the products being release din the near term (yellow) – In some cases it isn’t yet clear exactly when a release will occur so the company doesn’t want to set unrealistic expectations by giving an exact date yet. In the case of Katana 12.1 they are committing to a date whereas with Webshooter 1 they are committing to sometime during quarter 2 (April through June). The other product releases do not have published dates yet.

Figure 1. A product roadmap (text approach) from September 2016.

It’s interesting to note that for upcoming (red) they are choosing to just indicate new products they hope to release during that period but not releases of existing products. This is because this period is nine months or more into the future so promising exact dates to people becomes a questionable proposition, far better to indicate ranges for now. For the distant future (gray) the product roadmap shows potential ideas for new products but these are only vague “wish list” items at best right now, not all of which will be invested in.

Figure 2 depicts a timeline version of a product roadmap. It focuses on currently planned product releases and so it does not depict the future product ideas that we saw in Figure 5.   These product ideas would be captured elsewhere, perhaps as a list on a whiteboard some where.

Figure 2. A timeline version of a product roadmap.

What Should the Planning Horizon Be?

Product roadmaps tend to have a multi-year planning horizon. Figure 1 showed about two years of planning whereas Figure 2 a bit more than a year. There are several key considerations to take into account when determining your planning horizon. First is how often can your teams release? You typically want to be able to indicate several releases of your major products/solutions on your roadmap, which you can see in both examples. Second, how often do your customers want releases?   Third, how far in advance do your customers need to plan? This is a reflection of the sales cycle for your products, the longer the sales cycle the longer between releases of your product (usually) and the longer the timeframe covered by your roadmap.

How to Capture Product Roadmaps

There are two basic strategies for depicting product roadmaps:

1. Text lists. Figure 1 is an example of this format. The advantages are that this format is compact and easy to create with simple tooling. The main disadvantages are that it doesn’t show relationship between releases well nor is it very attractive visually.
2. Timeline diagrams. See Figure 2 for an example. The advantages of this approach are that it is visually appealing, which is particularly important when you are showing the roadmap to customers; it depicts timing relationships well; this format is supported by several product management tools; and you can even show dependencies between product releases, in a similar manner as you would do so on a Gantt chart (we didn’t do this in Figure 6). The primary disadvantage is that this format requires more sophisticated tooling to create.

Your product roadmap is an important part of your organization’s overall business vision. Another part of that vision is your business roadmap, the topic of a future blog.

The basic idea with rolling wave planning is that you plan things that are near in time to you in detail and things that are distant in time at a higher level. The thinking is that the longer away in time that something is the greater the chance that it will change during that time, therefore any investment in thinking through the details is likely wasted. You still want to plan at a high level to both guide your current decisions and to set people’s expectations as to what is likely to come.

In Figure 1 you see how a Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) team takes a rolling wave approach to release planning. This is a stable team that releases their product into production twice a year. The team has been in place for almost three years and as a result they no longer need to go through an Inception phase. The Construction phase is typically scheduled for twelve iterations. Their Transition phase still takes one week. Although they’ve automated their test and deployment scripts a long time ago they still need time for internationalization – in this case they need to finalize and acceptance test any translated work.

Figure 1. Rolling wave release planning on a solution delivery team.

Figure 2 overviews the level of detail that the team currently has captured in their requirements artifacts and in effect how they would show up in any sort of team work plan. The team is currently in the first construction iteration for the current release, implementing 5 user stories. There are thirteen additional user stories that have been explored in detail by the product owner which at the team’s current velocity is about one month of work. There are an additional thirty user stories identified but not yet explored, and several epics. In the middle of this current iteration the product owner is likely to run one or more look-ahead planning/modeling sessions (called backlog grooming or backlog refinement in Scrum). The goal of this effort will be to detail a few of the near term (yellow) stories to pull them into the very near term (green) category and maybe to even start breaking down an epic or two into more details stories. This effectively pulls work along in the plan. The team’s iteration/sprint planning session at the beginning of each iteration pulls work into the team at that point.

Figure 2. Solution release planning at construction iteration #1.

An interesting implication of this approach is at the beginning of the iteration it isn’t clear exactly what the team will deliver. As you can see in Figure 2 only about one-and-a-half months of work has been explored in detail (eighteen stories in total), an additional two months of work (thirty stories) has been identified at a high level and the rest at a very high level. In addition, the stakeholder’s priorities could shift and different stories and epics could be prioritized higher in the team’s work item stack (backlog) later on in construction.

Now let’s work through what things look like at the beginning of iteration #8.   As you can see in Figure 3 the team is currently working on six stories and has eleven more that have been detailed out for the next month or so. There are thirty-two stories identified for the near term (yellow) category. Interestingly, Construction ends in about two months (remember, the releases are six months long with this team). At this point in time it’s fairly clear what the team will deliver, albeit with some room for change given that there is still to months of construction left.

Figure 3. Solution release planning at construction iteration #8.

What Should the Planning Horizon Be?

In this example the planning horizon is fairly long because the team’s release cycle is fairly long at six months.   They chose to maintain about three months of details and kept everything else at a high level and that worked for them. We recently worked with a team at an e-commerce firm following the continuous delivery lifecycle where the distant future (grey) was anything more than two months away. As a result they had detailed requirements for the next two to three weeks (green), about the same number of stories that hadn’t been worked through yet for near term work (yellow), and then a collection of epics after that. The point is that you need to set your planning horizons according to the situation that you face. Context counts.

Capturing a Release Plan

A deliver team can choose to capture their release plan in several different ways, and could even combine strategies for doing so. Their options include:

1. Maintain the plan manually. Many teams will capture their requirements manually, using paper to capture the stories, acceptance criteria, and any supporting artifacts. For the current iteration the team manages their work on a whiteboard with sticky notes or corkboard with index cards. Future work is often tacked onto a corkboard or maintained in file folders or similar containers. The advantages of this approach are that the plan is easy to evolve and work with (you’re moving paper around). The disadvantages are that reporting also becomes manual (perhaps you’re asked to estimate your expected delivery date or cost using burn up or burn down charts), it doesn’t easily support geographic distribution, and that this strategy may be anathema to your governance people if they’re not experienced yet with agile development.
2. Use an agile management tool. Many teams choose to use agile management tools such as Atlassian Jira, VersionOne, Microsoft TFS, or Rally to name a few. These tools have the advantage that they support geographically distributed teams, they often also address any plan documentation needs for teams working in regulatory situations, they are often less threatening to your governance people, and they can even be integrated into any corporate reporting technologies your company has in place (such as Microsoft Project Server for example). The disadvantages are that they are often harder to use than manual strategies (regardless of the vendors’ marketing claims), agile management tools can still be threatening to traditional-leaning governance people because of they support a more agile way of working, and of course the need to pay for and learn them.
3. Create a Gantt chart. Your rolling wave plan can also be captured using Gantt charts (yes, Gantt charts can be used in an agile manner if you choose). The article Agile Project Planning Tips works through how a Gantt chart evolves with a rolling wave planning approach. The advantages are that Gantt charts are a familiar way to communicate your schedule to others and that your existing management tools likely support them already. The disadvantages are that Gantt charts can still be a bit clunky from an agile point of view and that many project management tools make it too easy to capture details that often prove to be of little value in practice.

A potential point of confusion is what to call this sort of plan. Up until now we’ve been using the term release plan. However, as you can see in both Figure 2 and Figure 3 the plan extends to more than a single release of this product. This is really a “multiple-release plan” or better known as a product plan (not to be mistaken with a product roadmap, something that your product management efforts will often produce). More on this in the next blog posting in this series.

For a long time now we’ve been applying what’s often called rolling wave planning with our clients. Rolling wave planning is applied in several areas of the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit, including release planning by a delivery team, technology roadmapping, and product roadmapping to name a few.  This blog overviews this important practice.

The basic idea is that you plan things that are near in time to you in detail and things that are distant in time at a higher level. The thinking is that the longer away in time that something is the greater the chance that it will change during that time, therefore any investment in thinking through the details is likely wasted. You still want to plan at a high level to both guide your current decisions and to set people’s expectations as to what is likely to come.

In Figure 1 below you see an overview of how rolling wave planning works and in Figure 2 an example of how a Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) team applies it for release planning. Upcoming work is planned in detail, the planning unit “X” is one month in the case of the delivery team. In order to do their work they need detailed user stories and supporting artifacts such as acceptance criteria and supporting models such as user interface (UI) sketches or data source analysis. They have this information for the work that they are doing right now as well as about one month’s of upcoming work. They don’t yet need details for work that is several months away in time. In this case for work that is two to three months in the future they only have user stories developed and work that is four to six months away epics. Work in what the team considers to be the distant future, in this case six or more months away, is described in very high-level terms such as epics or solution capabilities.

Figure 1. Rolling wave planning overview.

Figure 2. Rolling wave release planning on a solution delivery team.

Part of the work that the team is doing right now is to keep their plan up to date. For example, if they are working in two week iterations they will pull two weeks of work into the team. During the current iteration they will pull about two weeks of user stories from the near term category (the yellow box in Figure 2) into the very near term (the green box). They may also bring upcoming work into the near term category at this point too.

Rolling wave planning has its source in iterative software development such as the Rational Unified Process (RUP). It is a strategy that is commonly applied by agile software teams and the Project Management Institute (PMI)’s Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBoK) supports it.

Further Reading

• Rolling Wave Planning in Disciplined Agile
• Rolling Wave Planning for Product Roadmaps
• Rolling Wave Planning for Technology Roadmaps
• Rolling Wave Release Planning for Agile Delivery Teams

I recently wrote a detailed article about process tailoring workshops.  In a process tailoring workshop a coach or team lead walks the team through important aspects of the delivery process and the team discusses how they’re going to work together. This typically includes choosing a lifecycle, walking through the process goals one at a time and addressing the decision points of each one, and discussing roles and responsibilities.

There are several reasons why you want to tailor your team’s process:

1. Every team is unique and faces a unique situation.
2. You want to have a common vision as to how you’re going to work together.
3. You want to streamline how you work together.
4. You may actually need to document your process.

The article covers the following topics in detail:

1. Why process tailoring?
2. When do you run process tailoring workshops?
3. The risks associated with process tailoring workshops
4. Planning a process tailoring workshop
5. What should you tailor?
6. Running a process tailoring workshop
7. Documenting the results

I hope you find it useful.

One of the iconic movies of the 1980s was The Breakfast Club, which told the story of five very different teenagers who were forced to come into school one Saturday to serve detention.  Recently I’ve been working at a large insurance company helping them to adopt the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit.  One of people whom I’m working with has a Breakfast Club poster on the wall near her work area and it got me thinking about some of the dynamics that I’ve seen watching agile teams form and eventually gel.  Here are my thoughts.

At the start of the movie the kids didn’t really like each other, they were very different from one another, they certainly didn’t want to be there, and they were each coming to the group with their own point of view and background.  Sadly, I’ve seen more than one software project team that was put together like this.  As the movie progressed they began to really talk with one another and their stories started to emerge.  They started to work together, hijinks ensued, and they bonded as a group.  As part of their punishment they were each asked to write an essay describing what they learned from their detention.  Instead they wrote a single letter, which follows, that they submitted as a team.

“Dear Mr. Vernon:

We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong, but we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us… In the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain… …and an athlete… …and a basket case… …a princess… …and a criminal.

Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club."

So how does this relate to agile teams?

1. You often build teams from specialists.  Although we ideally recommend that you build teams from multi-disciplinary, T-skilled generalizing specialists, the reality is that many organizations are staffed with specialized people.  We like to say that you go to war with the army that you’ve got, or in other words you need to make do with what you have.  If all you have are specialized staff then that’s the people you have to form teams.  The good news is that you can help people to evolve from being specialists into generalizing specialists via building a cross-functional whole team, enabling and promote non-solo collaborative work within the team, and by training and coaching people.
2. It takes time for a team to gel.  In the movie the “team” gelled in a single day, but it’s rarely that fast in practice.  It often takes weeks, and sometimes months, for a team to really get to the point where they’re working together effectively (yet another reason to move towards stable solution delivery teams).
3. Co-location shortens the time it takes to gel.  When we’re co-located, everyone works together in the same room, it is much easier and much more likely that we will collaborate with one another.  Not only does this increased interaction help us to get the work done it also helps us to gel as a team faster.
4. We’re not as different from each other as we think.  One of the lessons that the kids learned in the movie is that each one of them had a bit of an athlete, a brain, a criminal, and so on in them.  Similarly, we’re not just programmers, or architects, or analysts but instead we all have some of those skills in us and we can certainly get better at the skills that we are weak on.
5. We are still different.  Every single person is a unique individual.  This implies that we must be flexible in the way that we collaborate with one another, that people simply aren’t “cogs in the corporate machine.”  We should also respect the fact that we each bring something of value to the team, a revelation that the kids in the movie stumbled upon when they had to work together to not get caught by Mr. Vernon (there were a few hijinks in the movie).
6. Working together as a team produces better results than a group of individuals.  As Alistair Cockburn likes to say, software development is a team sport.  In the movie the kids all got caught doing something on their own, hence the punishment of a Saturday in detention, yet together they managed to have a fair bit of fun as a team.  Similarly, you may be the best programmer in the world, but it behooves you to work with people who can help you to understand the requirements, design the solution, validate the solution, and so on.
7. We can all learn from each other.  Everyone has value to bring to the team and everyone has areas where they are weak on that could be improved.  By working closely together we can learn from each other and get better both as individuals and as a team.

The Breakfast Club is a great movie.  If you haven’t seen it, or haven’t seen it lately, then I highly suggest watching it again.