Managing Scaled Agile at Rosetta Stone

ERIC HILFER • VP OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING• ROSETTA STONE LTD • @EricHilfer1

Managing Scaled Agile at Rosetta Stone

Agenda A G I L E D E V E L O P M E N T

S C A L E D A G I L E

S C A L E D A G I L E W I T H J I R A

W H A T W E A C C O M P L I S H E D !

http://paulnoth.com

Autonomy The team is in charge.Self-organizing to solve challenges.

Respect and Honesty Trust your experts, and foster a safe environment to deliver bad news early, when it’s actionable.

What do we like about Agile?

Lean Continuous delivery of real, working software.

Why Scale?

Larger Deliverables Multiple Teams Alignment

•  Ramp up large, coherent initiatives

•  Dependencies

•  Hand-offs

•  Release Plan

•  Tracking

•  Predicting

•  Adapting

Do No Harm!

(No engineers were harmed while scaling this organization)

The Scaled Agile Framework

(SAFe)

Three levels of practice

Why use JIRA Software for agile development?

It’s already there! Ecosystem Distributed Teams Flexible

•  Best in class defect tool•  Avoid migration to

dedicated agile toolset•  Great price point

•  Engineering-friendly plugins

•  Confluence•  HipChat

•  Built for collaboration •  The good news: it’s highly configurable!

•  The bad news: it’s highly configurable!

How does it work in practice?

Portfolio Kanban Funnel for business Epics, with Agile Estimates plugin for in-board Epic sizing

Portfolio for JIRA

Team Board in Context

Multi-team rollup for planning and tracking

Agile boards with ScriptRunner plugin to share Epics across teams

Essential Portfolio and Program Practices

IMAGE SOURCE: http://scaledagileframework.com/business-epic-kanban/!

Portfolio Kanban Board

Epic Workflow •  Define Transitions

•  Need sufficient Admin Rights

•  Apply to all Epics

View, edit, epic-level sizing from Kanban board

Distributed planning poker

Agile Estimates Plugin

Add Story Points Field to Epics

Epic sizing in rough story points

Portfolio for JIRA

Multiple Project View Planning Tracking

•  Consolidated view of multiple JIRA projects

•  Resource skillsets across all teams

•  Size large chunks of work

•  Load balance across sprints and multiple teams

•  Create realistic release plan

•  Roll-up progress to release-level

•  Stay in synch with team-level reality

•  Adapt early

•  Clear view for stakeholders

Setting up teams

Setting up releases

•  Group by team or person

•  Color by Theme or Workstream

•  Show progress or and dependencies

Epic Plan

Viewing progress

Capacity utilization

What’s Next? A glimpse of Portfolio for JIRA V2!

What we accomplished

Alignment Coordination Transparency

•  Building the right things!

•  12-week view of planned work

•  Balancing work to real capacity

•  Anticipating hand-offs and delivering them smoothly

•  Dependency tracking across teams

•  Clear, agreed-upon release objectives

•  Program-level view of progress and impediments

•  Ability to respond while there’s still time!

Thank you!

ERIC HILFER • VP OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING• ROSETTA STONE LTD • @EricHilfer1