An Agile Response to an Urgent Business Shift

by Myles Bogner, Ph.D. and Steve Kanter

We had a small Agile software development team in one location.  Within this environment, we operated with the following tools:

• A Kanban board drawn on a whiteboard with post-it notes that were physically date-stamped as items moved through the queue
• Company provided git repository for source control
• Metrics gathered manually from the post-it notes and entered into Excel
• Daily reporting by taking a photograph of the Kanban board for transcription into emails

We received a new business paradigm that included the following requirements:

1. Software features in the development queue may change daily and possibly hourly
2. Ability to, at any moment, permanently record a snapshot that communicates the following three pieces of information:
   1. Release-ready features
   2. Current priorities
   3. Features currently in development

As we began to operate with these new expectations, we soon realized our current tool set for fulfilling these requirements was extremely difficult, tedious, and time consuming.  The developers were continually interrupted and our limited quality assurance resources were pulled away from testing.  Our limited personnel needed to be focused on their jobs.  The team was stressed, and our relationship with our project sponsor was becoming increasingly strained.

Additionally, enormous changes to the development team were scheduled for implementation the following month.  These included:

1. Tripling the size of the development staff
2. Changing from a single location and company to a team spread worldwide working for multiple organizations
3. Product roll-out

We knew that if we did not quickly address these problems and upcoming organizational changes, we would possibly be at a breaking point.

We needed to rapidly create a simple automated solution using readily-available tools.  We devised, implemented, and employed a process that automatically captures the required information and formats it into multiple presentation needs.

Business Need	Solution
Story tracking and a code repository with link to stories	GitHub (github.com)
Visually re-prioritize features collaboratively with customer	Huboard electronic Kanban (huboard.com) linked to GitHub
On-demand automated raw data capture	Publicly available code from https://gist.github.com/2369729, modified to add additional data fields (ruby_to_csv.rb)
Automated status capture	Custom Excel macro parses raw data to create daily Kanban state worksheets
Automated customer report generation	Custom Excel macro that outputs wiki-ready text
Metrics	Custom Excel pivot tables
Distributed team support	Huboard and Github online versions

Now each day, or optionally multiple times a day, with minimal personnel involvement to kick off automated processes, the following occurs:

• The project sponsor logs into Huboard to see the state of development and prioritize the team as desired
• Developers utilize the popular GitHub environment for distributed collaboration and as a source code repository
• As needed, the project manager or quality assurance engineer executes ruby_to_csv to capture the state of the Kanban board;  this <datestamp>_issues.csv file is uploaded to a repository for distributed team access and historical record
• Quality assurance executes the Excel macros which parse the data and prepare:

○ Point-in-time Kanban status worksheet showing queues

○ Wiki-ready text for a customer status report

• Quality assurance optionally generates Excel pivot tables that leverage the point-in-time status worksheets to display desired metrics such as cycle times

This straight-forward solution saves a tremendous amount of time, approximately three hours each day:

• The time quality assurance spent to capture and record metrics fell by two hours
• Project management time to pull together reports was reduced by one half hour
• Developers no longer are being regularly interrupted to field status questions saving at least a half hour

This solution has improved morale as all team members now focus on their primary responsibilities.  Our project sponsor is happier as there is up to the minute status enabling prioritization on the fly.  The team has valuable metrics for review and to facilitate improvement.  Most importantly, the team has a better synergy and rapport with our sponsor.