Agile @ BI 2020

1. Feature Owner

   Nota:

   • Responsible for managing the feature backlog, ensuring that the backlog is visible, transparent and clear to all, and ensuring that the teams understand the backlog to the level of detail needed.
2. Iteration Manager(s)

   Nota:

   • Feature owner support: Responsible for supporting feature owner with backlog management, helping with translation of backlog to the team, practicing agility, and facilitating cadences Team support:Responsible for coaching the team in self-organisation and cross-functionality,  helping the teams product quality output, helping the team with issue/blocker resolution, and facilitating cadences.
3. Development Team

   Nota:

   • Consist of multiple agile teams (ideally 7 members each) that are cross-functional and self-organizing, have minimal sub-teams, and are responsible for the actual development work supporting the feature backlog
   1. Consists of
      1. Off-shore members
      2. Onshore members
      3. Principle Engineers

         Nota:

         • Responsible for understanding the feature backlog, supporting IM's with defining and refining iteration backlog, story breakdown and estimation and for driving technical outcomes from their specific teams
4. Off-shore coordinators / Landed onshore Role

   Nota:

   • 2 Onshore/offshore tech coordination roles, working in tandem with one working onshore for 3 months, and then rotating with the other for the next 3 months to work off-shore. The roles are responsible for ensuring that the architecture and design thinking gets appropriately translated to the Agile teams, supporting IMs in planning and tech execution, and providing an additional QA layer between the Agile teams and the feature owner.

Nota:

• Have all competencies needed to accomplish the work without needing external support

Nota:

• The team is able to choose how best to accomplish its work, rather than being directed from outside the team

1. Architecture & Solution Design oversight

   Nota:

   • Responsible for providing architecture and design guidelines to the development teams, and ensuring technical alignment across teams.
2. Subject Matter Experts

   Nota:

   • SME involvement is in a support capacity, where they would be engaged to provide contextual knowledge around the organisations BI/EDW ecosystem, source system knowledge, data mapping rules, & business understanding. SMEs would not be responsible for driving technical outcomes through Agile teams

Nota:

• This is an ordered list of everything that might be needed in the feature and is the single source of requirements for any changes to be made to the feature. The feature backlog is owned by the feature owner. It is dynamic and can change based on what the feature needs to be. The backlog items must have attributes including description, order, estimate and value. Initial estimates can be done by feature owner / iteration managers, but the dev team is responsible for fine grain estimates based on greater clarity and increased detail.

Nota:

• Iteration backlog emerges as an outcome of iteration planning, and gets potentially modified throughout the iteration by the relevant Agile team. New work gets added by the team and completed work gets moved to done, with estimates for remaining work updated.

Nota:

• All backlog items completed during an iteration and the value of the increments for all previous iterations.

Nota:

• A time box of 2 weeks, commencing on Wednesdays and finishing on Tuesdays 2 weeks later. Consists of iteration planning, the development work, daily stand-ups, mid-iteration reviews, iteration reviews and retros.

Nota:

• Time boxed activity (2 hours), where activities / goals for the teams are planned collaboratively with each team. The responsibility of defining goals, supporting tasks and estimation resides with agile teams.

Nota:

• A daily 15-minute time-boxed activity to synchronize activities across the team, provide updates regarding the last 24 hours, and plan for the next 24 hours, in line with the iteration goals / backlog.

Nota:

• The development team demonstrates the work completed and answers questions regarding the increment. Can result in revisions to the feature backlog, which in turn provides probably backlog items for the next iteration.

Nota:

• Time-boxed (1 hour) activity: - to inspect how the last iteration went with regards to people, relationships, processes and tools - identify and order the major items that went well and potential areas for improvements - create a high level plan to implement improvements across ways of working for Agile teams

Nota:

• Team members must have shared understanding of what it means for work to be complete to ensure transparency. Ideally if multiple teams are working on the system or feature release, they should collectively define the definition of done.

Nota:

• Scaled agile framework should serve as an overarching framework for developing and sustaining complex products / features. It does not define a process for building products / features.