Teams new to scrum face lots of decisions – one critical decision for teams to perform efficiently is determining sprint length. Every team's needs are different, and there's rarely a one-size-fits-all approach to planning the length and organization of your sprint.

What is Scrum? How long should sprints be?

What is Scrum? Scrum is an Agile framework that gives teams guidelines on how to complete their work. It contains sets of roles, ceremonies, and considerations for how your work is completed.

An Agile sprint is a concept in scrum that represents a time box, i.e., a short amount of time the team has committed to complete the work. And how long is a sprint in Agile? Sprints in scrum can be as long as you want; however, it's most common for sprint length to be between 1 and 4 weeks. Teams running Scrum sprints need to decide what makes sense for them.

We often see that team's first instincts lean toward the extreme: Either 1-week sprints or 4-weeks sprints. While there are arguments for the varying lengths of sprints in scrum, here are some standard variables that you and your team should consider.

Sprint Planning for Planned vs. Unplanned Work

Before sprint planning begins, it's essential to define what you want to accomplish during that sprint. Instead of using overarching strategic objectives to guide your team, sprint goals should be smaller, more attainable chunks of work that can be completed in a shorter timeframe. 

If you are an Agile Scrum team with high variability in your work, longer sprints may give you the necessary buffer to complete the job. If you've got a 1-week sprint (with 1 of your 5 days already dedicated to ceremonies), even one or two random pieces of work can prevent your team from completing the work in the committed scope.

On the other hand, if the team has unplanned work with a lower level of urgency, Scrum sprint lengths that are shorter allow you to include the work in your Scrum sprint planning within a shorter period.

As far as how to best manage work, Jira is a great tool to help teams achieve this. Here's a guide on starting, managing, and completing a sprint using Jira. 

Time Dedicated to Scrum Ceremonies

How much time per week should sprint planning to be spent in scrum, retrospectives, backlog grooming, and demos? Shorter sprints mean more time is spent in these meetings. This becomes even more essential if you do not have dedicated roles (scrum master, product owner).

What we see in 1-week sprints is that teams can lose a full day (twenty percent of the sprint!) of each sprint to demos, retros, and planning. So the shorter your Agile sprints are in scrum, the more often you're having these ceremonies.

Size and Scope of Tasks

Is your work small enough to be completed in the sprint length? For example, if you are often not completing work in 1 sprint, a longer sprint in scrum may make sense (or you may just need to work on improving properly sizing your tasks).

Feedback Cycle

How often do I want to see and evaluate completed work? Is it acceptable to go 4 weeks without demonstrating the work that's being done? Do you need to know every week? Sprint length determines how often you see sprint demos and complete sprint retrospectives.

Inspection and Adaptation

There's no one-size-fits-all answer to optimal Scrum sprint length, and iteration is the key to scrum - so don't worry if your first choice doesn't work for your team. That's what your retrospectives are for, after all!

For more background on how we do Agile at Scale, read our case study on how Praecipio Consulting helped an enterprise client accelerate their Agile transformation.

Is your organization going through an Agile transformation? Learn about this robust framework and how our team can help your organization drive successful business outcomes through our Agile at Scale implementations. 

Please reach out if you have questions or are considering how to migrate your team to an agile approach.

What is a spike in agile software development? 

A spike, a term often used in SAFe, scrum and other agile frameworks, is a task designed to answer a question or gather information, rather than produce a product. An agile team will choose to include a spike in their sprint to support or prepare for future work if that work requires more information before it can be started. In short, a spike is an opportunity to research, test or explore the unknown before work begins. Creating a spike allows your team to dedicate time in a sprint to finding out more information in a defined time-box – or a set amount of time. 

Why Should I Use Spikes? 

The benefit of using a spike is that it helps agile teams anticipate and prepare for the amount of work they will need to do to accomplish a task. For example, if the work turns out to be either more or less effort than you expected, it could throw off the team's ability to complete the work they committed to. In other words, a spike helps scrum and agile teams with estimation and prevents them from falling behind on sprint goals. 

Who Typically Initiates a Spike?  

Anyone on a scrum or agile team can and should initiate a spike if they feel they are not prepared to begin a specific task or story. Typically, if a team member takes on a task and recognizes that they need more information before they can begin, they can create a spike to help them prepare. It can be frustrating to find out mid-sprint that a story is much more work than you thought because you didn't really know what it required yet. When running in sprints and trying to manage velocity, it helps to build in room for uncertainty. It may be that there's a piece of work that needs to be completed, but we're not really sure how much work that's going to take. In these cases, using spikes can be a huge help. 

Related Article: Sprint Planning: How Long Should Sprints Be 

How do I use spikes in Jira?

One of the ways to manage spikes in Jira, is to establish them as their own issue type and then, once solved, convert that issue type from a spike into a story when you are ready to begin work. You can link it back to the spike using the JIRA issue links for record keeping. To start your first spike, follow these steps: 

1. Determine who on your team will take on the spike
2. Create a ticket to represent a spike in your backlog
3. Determine the amount of time, or time-box, that you are willing to spend on your spike 
4. Complete the necessary exploration or design during the sprint to create an estimate for the original story
5. Close out the spike and update the original story with the new estimate 
6. Convert your issue from a spike to a story 

Using spikes in your sprints can make your teams more reliable – by giving you a better idea of what's going on, with less pressure to know everything up-front.

Looking for more guidance on your agile transformation?  Contact us, one of our experts would love to talk with you and see if it's a good fit for your organization.

Organizations are rapidly moving toward new work management styles, especially in the age of digital transformation. If you work in project management, you've probably heard the term "Agile" at some point in your career. Maybe you've considered taking this approach with your teams, and have already done some research. "Scrum" is another term you've most likely heard during your research. Although this is a term used in rugby, it is also a specific methodology teams use to work in an Agile manner. At Praecipio Consulting, we've assisted many teams 

with their move to Agile, using the Atlassian toolset to support and ease their journey. We've also worked with many teams who use Scrum specifically, but many use different frameworks - using Scrum is not a requirement to be Agile. Let's take a moment to understand the difference between Scrum and Agile.

What is Agile?

Agile is a project management style in which organizations use an iterative process to continuously deliver work while consistently receiving and incorporating feedback throughout the process. Flexibility is key, so teams can quickly adapt to market changes and customer needs. Agile has a set of principles and values organizations are expected to follow, laid out in the Agile Manifesto. The Agile Manifesto does not delve into specific practices and activities teams should follow in order to work in an Agile way: it serves as a north star for organizations to align to in their Agile journey. There are a few Agile frameworks teams can use to work in an iterative manner, such as Scrum and Kanban. Agile puts an emphasis on people over processes and tools, and gives autonomy to the people on those teams. With that being said, it is up to the teams to decide which framework works best for the way they work and the work they're delivering. 

What is Scrum?

Scrum is one of the many frameworks teams can use to work in an Agile manner. It is mainly used by software development teams, and relies on time-boxed iterations called Sprints. Sprints are made up of the work developers commit to completing within that iteration, typically 2 weeks. The work scheduled in each sprint is based on priority and team capacity, and is carefully estimated to ensure teams can commit the work they've delegated to the sprint. This framework is very detailed, and prescribes a set of specific roles and events, including:

• A Scrum Master, who protects the teams and ensures they are able to do their work without impediments.
• A Product Owner, who manages and grooms the product backlog ensuring the anticipated work aligns with the needs of the customer and business.
• The development team who actually complete the work in the sprint.

As I mentioned above, Scrum is a way teams can work if they're on their Agile journey, but it is not the only option. There are other Agile frameworks that may work better for teams.

How Do Agile and Scrum Differ?

Now that we know a bit more about Agile and Scrum separately, it's easier to lay out the differences between the two. Agile is more of a general philosophy that paints a broader picture around working in an iterative, flexible manner. Scrum is a specific Agile framework and is more granular than Agile. Although both rely on iterations: in Scrum they're specifically time boxed and called Sprints. Scrum also prescribes specific roles and ceremonies, while Agile focuses on the overall principles in the Agile Manifesto. Scrum is also more focused on the team level and the delivery of work. Agile can be scaled across an organization using other work frameworks such as the the Scaled Agile framework, or SAFe, as well as Large-Scale Scrum, styled as LeSS. 

With that understanding in mind, maybe you're ready to start your Agile journey! The Atlassian tools, such as Jira and Confluence, are built to support Agile and the specific frameworks. Jira Software makes it easy to get started with Scrum by providing an out-of-the-box Project template. At Praecipio Consulting, we focus on ensuring the Atlassian tools facilitate your Agile journey by implementing best practices and incorporating our extensive experience working with Agile teams. Reach out if you have any questions around Atlassian and Agile - we're here to help.

No, seriously: can we please take a moment to talk about spreadsheets? I have a very large bone to pick with them. Spreadsheet is a four-letter word to me; and don't get me started on workbooks! I recognize spreadsheets have their place in the world. I'm always in awe when I see the most complicated and fragile spreadsheet being used to manage a simple set of data to provide "insights" into the business. Even better, a spreadsheet that helps manage prioritization, planning, and execution reporting on a regular cadence. I've seen complex CountA and SumIf formulas, and Concatenate, and pivot tables, and everything else people can throw at them. And while I'm impressed at the craftsmanship, I'm also incredibly frustrated. The time it took to create and iterate on that reporting could have been spent having conversations about the work or checking in with a team or removing blockers. Instead, the extraction, manipulation, and reporting of easily-accessible, real-time data takes precedent. 

While it was published in 2014, I still reference an article when discussing data and reporting with our clients: This Weekly Meeting Took Up 300,000 Hours per Year. Yes, you read that right: 300,000 Hours. Per. Year! A single team extracting data, then aggregating it across several teams, then teams of teams, then programs, then everywhere else, all to be reviewed in a 30-minute executive meeting where the conversation was, "Are we on track? Yes? Great."  <sends weekly update deck to recycle bin>.

I hold no ill-will to the spreadsheet warriors out there. Instead, I view it as a simple case of "We've always done it this way." Well, what if I could show you a different way? What if, through the power of Atlassian, I could provide you real-time analytics? What if I could show you how to integrate Jira with a Business Intelligence solution? Or provide Program and Portfolio Management including planning and execution data in Advanced Roadmaps or Jira Align? How many hours would that save you or your organization when providing in-depth analytics to executive management? I promise you, this is all possible. 

Individual Team Metrics: Scrum and Kanban

Individual Team metrics are available for both Scrum and Kanban Teams under Reports in a Jira Software project. For Kanban Teams, both the Cumulative Flow Diagram and Control Chart provide flow metrics for the Team. While it may have been a while since you've taken a statistics class (if at all...I confess I tried hard to avoid them), spending ten minutes reviewing these reports will provide information on bottlenecks, flow trending, and backlog growth. Adding Quick Filters to your Kanban Boards will allow you to drill down into a specific subset of data on your board. Want to focus on Stories or Bugs only? Create the Quick Filters. 

Scrum Teams have nine (yes, NINE) reports available on their boards. Are you using the Burndown during your Daily Standup? Can you predict your release of an Epic or Version based on the throughput in those reports? Have you reviewed the Sprint Report to see what was added or didn't complete during the Sprint and asked why? The Scrum Reports will tell you what is happening during the Sprint (or happened, during the Retrospective), but it's up to you and the Team to ask why it happened. 

Need additional assistance to understand what these metrics are telling you? There's a training class for that. Praecipio Consulting is happy to help!

Program, Product, or Teams of Teams Metrics

Client: "Hey, Amanda, we're pretty good on the individual team stuff. Is there another way we can aggregate team data together?" 

Me: "How much time you got?" 

Three solutions come to mind for this one:

First, let's talk about Advanced Roadmaps for Jira. As always in the Atlassian tools, flexibility is key. When creating a Plan in Advanced Roadmaps, tying the work to the Teams by pulling in the scope of work is the first step. Whether it's a Board, a Project, or a Filter, aggregating data across multiple Teams, then tying the source to the execution team, provides you predictable velocity and capacity planning as well as execution reporting. 

• You want Progress? You got issue count and story point or time-based progress.
• You want to predict a milestone (read: release) date? You got milestone dates.
• You want dependency maps? You got dependency maps.
• You want to look at the Plan in a capacity view or a release view or a specific timeframe? You got custom views. 

Sharing all this information from Advanced Roadmaps in Confluence is amazing. While native in Confluence Cloud Premium, you can download and install the free app from the Atlassian Marketplace for Data Center. If you would prefer to simply share a link to the specific view of the Roadmap, that's available to you as well. 

Second, EazyBI. We constantly hear of clients looking for a more robust way to cube and concatenate data across their Jira instance. However, our clients tend to revert to what's comfortable: the spreadsheet. Instead, using an OLAP analysis and multi-dimensional calculations, EazyBI can provide the complex reporting when Jira's native Reports and Dashboards just won't do. EazyBI started as a purpose-built solution for Jira: it recognizes Jira's data structures and surfaces field data you may not be able to work with in native Jira. Since it's a unidirectional sync, EazyBI will not change your Jira data either. EazyBI can also integrate with other data sources including (sigh) a spreadsheet. 

Third, Jira Align. Here at Praecipio Consulting, we love Jira Align. The Program Room brings together all the information from multiple teams, i.e. an Agile Release Train. Every bit of data from Jira Software is aggregated to provide a clear understanding of the pace of the Train. The Program Board, the current implementation Roadmap with risk indicators, the investment data, the actual execution data, all of it is available in the highly-configurable Program Room. Burnups, Burndowns, progress by Epic, this is all available in Jira Align. In fact, there are over 180 reports available in Jira Align. And if that's not enough, Jira Align BI extends the already-robust reports into your existing visualization tools or your enterprise data lake. 

Enterprise Business Intelligence Integration

You may already have a Business Intelligence solution. Quite frequently at Praecipio, we hear our clients mention PowerBI, Tableau, or data lakes such as Hadoop or Snowflake. These powerful solutions are likely already embedded in your organization. And there's probably a SME out there just waiting to assist. Enterprise organizations usually have an integrations team to help connect Jira and other data sources. In fact, we worked with a large organization to consolidate Jira instances to better connect data to their business intelligence platform. In just 12 short weeks, they were able to analyze and report on their current execution progress simply by being able to feed consolidated Jira data into their business intelligence platform. 

At Praecipio, we have extensive integrations experience across a wide-range of technologies. We can recommend Atlassian Marketplace apps as a fit-for-purpose solution or we can work with third-party integration engines to help you map data for enhanced metrics. 

Take a moment to step back and really examine your use of spreadsheets. While, again, they have a purpose in this world, to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The spreadsheet is dead. Long live the spreadsheet.

We think you may also like this webinar by the author: Proving Value: How Business Leaders Use Jira Align to Connect Strategy and Execution.

If you work in tech, you've most likely heard of the term "Agile". Agile is a framework typically used by software and project management teams to deliver better quality work to customers in a more timely manner. Depending on the way organizations approach their journey to becoming Agile, there are various methods they can use to get there. One of the most popular Agile frameworks is Scrum, which proposes teams lean on time-boxed iterations, called Sprints, to complete their work. At the end of each Sprint, Retrospectives are to be completed. Retrospectives are meetings where Scrum teams discuss how to improve the way they work; they are typically held every 1 or 2 Sprints. They give the team a chance to come together and discuss what they liked, what they disliked, or what they felt could've gone better during the Sprint.  Many teams neglect to complete this step, even though it is one of the most important items teams can leverage if they're aiming to truly be Agile. Thinking about Retrospectives and their benefits made me realize how useful they can be for all teams, not just Scrum teams. 

Retrospectives and Non-Scrum Teams

Retrospectives are great for non-scrum teams in that they push teams to look back and reflect on the work they've completed. This reflection is key for future work, as teams can avoid past mistakes or time-eating efforts that negatively affected the efficiency of their last project. They can do the same for the items that lead to success in their previous projects so the team can consistently deliver their best work efficiently.

Additionally, retrospectives are great for promoting team unity and trust across the team members. When team members can openly share their honest opinions about how the team is doing, team communication improves, leading to better quality work and better relationships between team members. Any team can benefit from this, no matter how the team goes about completing their work.

Consistent reflection and analysis of completed work are excellent tools, even if the team isn't using Sprints and your work isn't necessarily time-boxed. At Praecipio Consulting, we hold retrospectives after the completion of every engagement. Looking back on the wins and losses, I can't help but feel a sense of pride amongst my team members on the work we delivered. Setting aside this time for the team to come together and communicate with one another allows our delivery teams to grow and bond with one another. Not to mention, the work we produce increases in quality and the processes behind that work become more efficient. 

If you are curious about Agile, and would like to see if it's a good fit for your organization's needs, contact us and one of our experts will get in touch.

A question that I'm often asked is: Why have so many different roles on a scrum team? If a developer on a scrum team has the experience to act as the Scrum Master as well, is there any harm in consolidating? Short answer: Yes!

Although having one team member covering multiple roles seems more efficient, it can cause more problems than its worth. Before putting a team member in multiple roles, it's important to consider the following challenges.

Context Switching

Statistics show that it takes an average of 25 minutes to resume a task after being interrupted. Jumping between tasks that require completely different mindsets and skills require a huge context shift. Having a developer who is switching between working on code and managing blockers for the team can actually reduce efficiency. It may be more effective to have a Scrum Master working as a Scrum Master for multiple teams. 

Skills & Training

The skills needed to be a successful Product Owner (PO) are different than those needed to be a Scrum Master, which are different than those that make a good developer! The Scrum Master should have a high level of emotional intelligence and act as a leader for the developers. Developers should be subject matter experts, familiar with the best practices and best ways to implement the PO's requirements.

Conflicts of Interest

The Scrum Team is designed to have certain checks and balances – each role is well defined so that they can focus on the subject matter they are there for. When you start consolidating roles, there's a high risk of conflicts of interests. This is very clear when organizations try to combine PO and Scrum Masters – after all, one of the major jobs of the Scrum Master is to protect the team from scope creep, represented by the PO. Additionally, the Scrum Master unblocks the development team if needed, and helps facilitate the scrum ceremonies – an important part of that requires allowing the team to work through issues before utilizing your authority to pull in outside stakeholders. 

It can be tempting to try and combine your Scrum roles, but we strongly recommend respecting the division of responsibility that has been established. 

If your teams are having trouble with their scrum roles, have any question or just want to chat, contact us, we'd love to help!

Imagine a world where businesses can concurrently develop next generation manufacturing processes while designing products based upon the as-yet-non-existent implementation medium. Imagine that they can do this all while reducing time-to-market and allowing the continued benefit of exponential growth in complexity every 18 months. Add a twist of “design-anywhere-build-anywhere” – and serve shaken; not stirred. Perhaps in software, the analogy might be "develop applications on a language being implemented and SDKs that will also be created concurrently – trust us, it will be fine." At the same time, many graduates from engineering colleges were learning that the soft skills of communication and collaboration had higher impact to their success than the hard earned technical skills.

In the early 1990s, an organization is asked by several of its clients to help them address time-to-market pressures. The result: in 1992 Don Carter published a book founded upon a transformational approach called Concurrent Engineering based on consulting experiences. One impact that I remember well was the increase in actual conversations amongst the various constituents - breaking down the barriers between the silos was a key component of this philosophy. Coincidentally, the quality of results increased too, along with client satisfaction.

Back to the future... Literally!

There is even more pressure on businesses to reduce time-to-market, and there are few signs that this will change or needs to change. No time for creating voluminous documentation in semi-isolation that can't capture all aspects and are often subject to interpretation by the reader. The division between hardware and software development has blurred. In fact, hardware designs are created, modeled, emulated, and the proposed implementations are verified using specialized high level languages prior to implementation. The abstracts are subsequently decomposed into manufacturable entities while continuously confirming no unintended loss of the design intent using specialized tools such as formal verification tools. 

Businesses are and must continue becoming Agile – businesses are greater than having Agile development organizations. So the adoption of Agile, Scrum, and other practices continues unabated. There are even early discussions of what’s beyond these Agile practices that are standing the test of time after several decades of adoption. 

Two important aspects of the Agile Manifesto are valuing “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” and “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”. It was increasingly common pre-COVID that these teams were distributed geographically and even culturally. So while tools are a part of the solution – the need to communicate well and often has never been more important. This practice is standing the test of time.

A closing note to Scrum Masters who help teams live the benefit of the cross-functionality objective: Your Scrum teacher and Agile coaches have provided you with lots of reference material about building teams and communications. Now is a good time to revisit those references; one of my favorites is “Crucial Conversations” by Kerry Patterson et al. The book addresses situations with perceived high stakes, diverse constituents, and possibly highly emotions.

Looking for more Scrum tips? Contact us, we love to help!

Good reporting capabilities are essential to Agile teams using Jira Software - and for good reason! Data visualization tools are essential for promoting good communication and collaboration. One of the most sought-after reports is included in Jira Software out of the box: the burndown chart. Read on to learn how Jira makes it easy to generate and share the burndown chart with your team and stakeholders. 

The Inputs

1. A Scrum Board: In Jira, the burndown chart is accessible through Scrum boards only.
   • To create a scrum-type board, follow these instructions from Atlassian. Column mapping is a key configuration point, as it's the basis for the burndown chart. 
2. An Estimation Statistic: Determine how your team will measure work, and set an estimation value on each of the issues in your sprint.
   • Jira accommodates for Story Points, original time estimate, issue count, or any custom field, provided that the custom field is a numeric custom field type.
   • We know that this can be a sticking point for your team and asked our Principle Amanda Babb to shared her thoughts about Scrum Team time tracking to help you along the way. 
3. An Active Sprint: Once your sprint starts, begin to review your team's progress. 

The Interpretation

Once the sprint starts, you can review the burndown chart along the way to understand the amount of remaining work in a particular sprint and gather feedback on the sprint itself. Below are a few scenarios that the burndown chart captures:

Scope Creep:

Scope creep is often unavoidable, so it's necessary to understand when they occurred especially if your team is no longer on target to meet its sprint goal. Here, the burndown chart reflects an increase in scope.

Opportunity for Alignment: 

It's important for the team to collaborate and land on an estimate for each work item in the sprint - not so much for the actual estimate itself but more for the shared understanding based on the requirements. This is often seen in both over and under estimates on the burndown chart. Below, the burndown chart reflects where some work was overestimated; the team is on track to complete the work well before the end of the sprint. 

Plateaus: 

Plateaus on the burndown chart are typical when you have a team who is either new to Agile as a whole or new to working together. It's an indication that the team got off to a good start early on, but didn't carry the effort through the remaining work items. 

Ready to learn how Jira Software can help your Agile teams collaborate and communicate while working in Agile sprints? Drop us a line!

I have to admit, I’m biased. As a manager and a business person, I have a vested interest in my teams success. That success is built upon them achieving a sustainable pace of delivering value to paying clients while supporting their personal growth. 

The definition of “done” is a powerful tool. In my journey as an Agile Coach and Scrum Master, I have found that focusing on the team’s definition of ‘Done’ provides tremendous return on effort. If your team jokes about ‘Done’, ‘Done done’, and ‘Done, done, done’ - there is usually a gold mine of opportunity for continuous improvement.

I believe in the strong relationship between defining done and improving a team’s overall well being – I've seen it first hand. Conversely, I see high dissatisfaction within the team, from the Product Owner and people outside the team when there isn’t a clear definition. In the knowledge business, people like to create and provide things that others use; they generally hate building the wrong thing or things that aren’t wanted or used.

Here are a couple of real world examples from teams I've worked with:

1st example from a real demoralized team:

Scrum Team: “We define ‘done’ as the feature being ready for QA to test.”

Scrum Master: This is clearly an anti-pattern to delivering a potentially releasable unit of value. We’re doing Wagile, not Scrum!

Expunge that way of thinking permanently and never say it – ever!  Seek first to understand…

A Scrum Master should always assume that people are rational and therefore behave rationally. Dig into the reason for the definition. Perhaps this was the team establishing a working agreement based upon having a lone QA person and this was seen as a solution not a problem. I bet that they’d love some help that can result from simply asking “what can we do as a team to help you with your workload?” See the world from their perspective. They may be transitioning from classical waterfall workflows and the team hasn’t adjusted to the concept of a cross-functional team.

Use the principle of “take it to the team”.

How can we (the Scrum team) help you? Help ourselves?

Scrum Masters also use individual 1-on-1 coaching – How can the team and/or I help you?

2nd example from a real team:

Scrum Team: “We define ‘done’ as the feature being implemented, passing tests, and meeting the acceptance criteria – but we never release anything.”

Finding possible root causes is again key. Problem solving requires an agreed upon statement of the problem and the desired outcome from a change. In this case – it appears that it is potentially releasable, so the team may have a variety of options such as exploring:

• What is (are) the root cause(s)? Where does the team have the capability?
• Discussing with the Product Owner as to why value isn’t being released?
• What if we did a dark release so that we can keep our release ‘muscles’ toned?

Please note that the 3rd bulleted item shifted to exploring possible solutions. 

Two parting questions:

• When should these discussions occur?
• Who should be involved?

If you're wondering if Agile is a good fit for your organization, or have any questions on Scrum methods, contact us, we would be delighted to help.

Congratulations on becoming a Scrum Master (SM)!

Scrum is a tool that builds teams. It exposes the issues but not the causes and solutions. A Scrum Master helps their team grow through continuous improvement & collaboration. 

As a builder of teams, I’ve often seen smart employees and colleagues return from training and struggle with how to apply their new knowledge. Most often, failure occurs when the returning person takes an approach of telling people what to do and why the current approach is wrong.

At a recent Atlassian Community Event, I was asked to present on a topic of my choice. After some thought (and to be honest, a poll to our Client Delivery team), I decided on Release Management using Jira. It's a frequent topic of discussion with our clients: how can I understand what will be or is released? Also, what changed between what was in Production to what is in Production now?

I've seen many complicated solutions and I've seen many simple solutions. However, your team, your company, or your organization has to hash out the following: 

• What is your definition of "Done"?
• What is your definition of "Release"?
• Are these two things in conflict? 

Definition of Done versus Definition of Release

As you may already know, in Scrum, "Done" is when the Product Owner accepts the story as complete, meeting all acceptance criteria, and packaged into a potentially shippable increment. While I agree with this definition, at the same time I challenge the phrase, "potentially shippable." This is where you, your teams, your operations teams, and your product managers need to have a conversation. Does "Done" and "Released" mean the same thing across your organization?

In one organization, they had four definitions of done: Done, Done-Done, Done-Done-Done, and Done-Done-Done-Done. In reality, they were defining the QA, deployment, and Production Release processes with the four separate definitions of "Done". This was also directly related to their use of Jira Software and how to demonstrate success to management. Notice I said success and not progress. The Teams wanted credit for code complete in Jira to demonstrate a predictable velocity. QA wanted credit for the test complete in Jira to demonstrate a continuous flow. Jira Release Managers wanted credit in Jira for integration activities before deploying to production. Operations wanted credit in Jira Software for the production deployment. As you can imagine, this was relatively messy in Jira and tying work from code complete through managing the release in Jira to Production was excruciating.

While Done may be clearer to your organization, "Release" may not be as clear. Different parts of the organization will have different definitions of Release. For a team, "Release" may mean the code has been deployed to a QA environment. For Operations, "Release" may mean deployment to Production. In the example above, "Done" and "Release" meant the same thing among the teams, QA, and Jira Release Management, but not Operations. Nor did it mean the same thing across the organization. Without clarity across the organization, tracking and managing Releases in Jira Software becomes nearly impossible. Clearly defining "Done" and clearly defining "Release" across the organization can drive organizational alignment. Once you understand these two concepts, you can manage these Jira releases in Atlassian using the following two methods: The Release Issue Type or Bitbucket Pipelines.

Method One: The Release Issue Type

Within your SDLC projects in Jira, create a new Issue Type called, "Release." This lets the organization know that, while code is complete, there are additional items that need to be fostered through the process. These may include documentation, release notes, a hardening sprint, or anything that can foster work from code complete to Production. The additional items can be managed as Sub-Tasks of the Release to understand the scope of work needed to move it through the process.

As with any new Issue Type, the Release in Jira will need a Workflow. The Workflow can be simple, however, we recommend using a Ready for Production Status in the workflow. When integrating Jira with Jira Service Management, the transition to Ready for Production is a perfect time to automate creating a Change Request. Your Operations team can review the change request with a link back to the Jira Release Issue Type.

How do we know which stories and bugs are tied to the Release in Jira? Do we link all the work to the Release Issue Type? No. I mean, you could, but why take the time to do that? Is it really a value-added activity for traceability? Is there another way to tie these things together that could be quicker and easier? The answer: Yes.

Even long-time users of Jira forget about Versions. If used properly, Versions can provide every team the status, progress, and any known issues in a single view in the Release Hub. This is true for all development activities AND the Release issue. By adding the Fix Version of the intended Release, every part of the organization can see the progress of the Release. Because JQL supports Versions, all items tied to a Fix Version can be displayed in other places such as a Dashboard or a Confluence page. With a little up-front discipline during backlog refinement, or sprint planning, or even big room planning, managing a release in Jira is as simple as adding a Fix Version to the work as well as the Release issue.

When managing Releases in Jira, once the Release issue has been deployed to Production, always go back and release the Version in Jira. Anything that is not in a "Done" status category can either move to the next Version or be removed from any Version entirely.

What if a story or bug spans multiple Releases? There is still only one Release issue per Version. However, I would also challenge you to take a look (again) at your definition of Done versus your definition of Release. Are you actually completing the work or are you pushing it forward again and again because there's a problem? In the next backlog refinement meeting and/or retrospective, ask why this continues to happen. Really dig in and understand whether the work needs to be moved to an Epic, de-prioritized, completed in the next sprint, or abandoned altogether.

Method Two: Bitbucket Pipelines

Using Bitbucket Pipelines still requires your organization to have a conversation defining "Done" and "Release". However, the entities that support these definitions are different when integrating Jira and Bitbucket Pipelines. The Jira Release is managed through the Pipeline and requires little human intervention. Instead, we work with a series of Workflow Triggers and automated deployments to determine where the Release is in its process.

You still need to create a Version in Jira. You still need good discipline during backlog refinement and sprint planning to ensure work is tied to the correct Version. You may also choose to halt the automation just before deployment to Production based on your Change Management processes. Clarify the process before implementing it in Atlassian.

After your Version is created and work is tagged with the Version, add Triggers to your development workflows. For example, you can automate a transition from Open to In Progress based on the creation of a Branch in Bitbucket. You can also automate a transition to Closed or Done once a Pull Request is merged. Triggers in Jira Workflows keep people focused on the work instead of Jira. But where Bitbucket Pipelines really shine is everything that happens after code is merged. Separate Pipelines can be created per environment. For example, if you need to manually deploy to production, a Pipeline can automate the process through build and deploy to a staging environment after it passes all checks. Commits, build, and deploy information is visible in the Development Panel of the individual story or bug. You can even quickly understand failures and receive additional information by clicking on the failure. For a specific Version, as long as work is tagged, you can aggregate the overall health of the Release in the Release Hub by viewing the Version. Status, success, warnings, and errors are available in a central location. If everything looks good, simply click a button and deploy to Production. Alternatively, if the staging deployment is successful, automate the production deployment in the Pipeline as well.

Which Release Management in Jira is right for you?

At Praecipio Consulting, we believe the answer is: "It depends." Regulatory compliance, risk tolerance, product uptime requirements, etc., may dictate which Jira Release Management method is right for your organization. And, to boot, the answer can be different for different parts of the organization. However, the critical first step to implementing release management using Atlassian Jira is to have a conversation. Are your definitions of "Done" and "Release" at odds with one another? What do they mean from a process perspective? Is there room for improvement in those definitions? If you can answer those questions you’re well on your way to having effective release management in Jira.

We here at Praecipio Consulting have extensive experience with both Jira Release Management best practices and the Atlassian suite of products, which we are happy to share with you to help you achieve more effective release management with Jira.

TL;DR: No!

Can one person hold both the Product Owner (PO) and ScrumMaster(SM) role in an Agile team? It's a question that a lot of companies starting their way through their Agile transformation will ask themselves (and us!). The Scrum team has three specific roles: Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and (most importantly) the Development team. It's clear why the question of combining SM and PO comes up so often - trying to figure out where current roles fit into the new dynamic can be a challenge for an organization, especially if your teams are now smaller and you don't have enough resources to fill the role of an SM and PO for each team. 

However, combining these roles is the biggest disservice you can do for your Agile teams. It may seem like a small tweak to the model, but given the functions of the two roles, you are setting up your teams for failure. Let's start with the definitions of these two roles so we can see why that is. 

Product Owner

The focus of the Product Owner is on the Product, as you might have guessed by now.  According to ScrumAlliance.org, "The Product Owner defines the what--as in what the product will look like and what features it should contain." The PO is responsible for maintaining the product backlog, and are responsible for communicating with stakeholders internally and externally to identify what the development team is working on. In their day-to-day, they are responsible for creating and prioritizing backlog items and communicating with the team expectations and acceptance of complete work items. 

ScrumMaster

The focus of the ScrumMaster is the team. "The ScrumMaster helps the Scrum Team perform at their highest level. They also protect the team from both internal and external distractions. ScrumMasters hold the Scrum Team accountable to their working agreements, Scrum values, and to the Scrum framework itself", as defined by ScrumAlliance.org. Where the PO is focused on What, the SM is focused on Who and How.  Arguably, the most important part of this definition is the emphasis on protecting the team. Internal distractions often come in the form of scope creep – new scope being introduced once work has already been committed to. In Scrum this often looks like new stories or bugs being introduced in the middle of a Sprint, and the job of the SM is to prevent this from happening as much as possible.

While I'm sure that we all know that some scope creep is inevitable (unless perhaps you're inhabiting the perfect utopia of business environments, in which case, I'll keep an eye out for my invite), but it can get out of hand quickly if there is no one on the team who is able to push back against the business. 

Okay, so why can't they be the same person?

By definition, the role of the ScrumMaster is to protect the team from the Product Owner (and the stakeholders that they are representing). Blurring the lines between these two roles mean that there is no one to push back when scope is added last minute, or ensure that the team is sticking to Scrum best practices, despite heavy workloads.

The most common outcomes that we see when these two roles are combined are:

1. Tons of scope creep. Just, loads of it. All over the place.
2. Sprint commitments are consistently not met because the team is being asked to do more work than they've agreed they are able to. 
3. Product Owners assign out work to the team , as they are now "Managing" the team. 
4. Buggier products –  after all, if I'm a developer trying to get through more work than I've acknowledged I can do, quality is inevitably going to suffer

Overall, not great!!

So what should I do then?

In a perfect world, you should have a single ScrumMaster per team, and Product Owner per product. This means that Product Owners can span multiple teams, if the teams are working from the same product backlog, but ScrumMasters are dedicated to a single team. If you don't have enough resources to commit to this model, in the short term, a ScrumMaster could potentially span more than one agile team - but I would say no more than 2 - after all, one person can only attend so many Scrum ceremonies while also being available to unblock their teams. 

However, the long term success of your Agile transformation means that it's time to start planning to fill those roles. Combining these roles will almost certainly decrease the effectiveness of your move to agile, as your teams are left unprotected and (likely) overworked. 

Looking for more information on Scrum best practices? Check out Sprint Planning - How long should sprints be?

The short answer: Not really. Stories and bugs are both software development items by different names. As such, the vast majority of activities and controls that we model for a story are applicable to bugs. The key distinction between stories and bugs often comes down to data. Bugs should include Affects Version/s, Steps to Recreate, Expected Behavior, and Actual Behavior. How and when we require this data relies on what practices we're observing.

For teams using Kanban practices where there is a Backlog status and a Ready for Development status, the transition to Ready for Development can be used to capture required data based on issue type. In this simple case, we would have two transitions from Backlog, Ready for Dev and Ready for Dev - Bug. For each transition, include a transition-specific screen to capture the appropriate fields.  Example: SDLC Ready for Dev - Bug Transition Screen will include: Affects Version/s, Steps to Recreate, Expected Behavior, and Actual Behavior in addition to any other fields needed in both cases. Then, leveraging your workflow conditions allow the Bug issue type to only use the Ready for Dev - Bug transition. All other issue types can default to the Ready for Development transition by explicitly checking that the current issue type is not a bug.

The considerations above work well in workflow cases where you have gated controls as a function of status change. This might apply to teams that include requirements definitions and design efforts within the story or bug life cycle (as might be the case with Waterfall). Additionally, this logical approach allows for workflow reuse which in turn decreases administrative burden and increases process consistency.

Scrum teams view Ready for Development a bit differently. Good Scrum practices dictate that product owners will refine their backlog as items are prioritized upward. Refinement provides all functional details necessary for the scrum team to be able to work the ticket including validation of bug reports and associated details. Once prioritized, the development team will review stories and bugs at the top of the backlog to make sure they understand the requirements. The work is considered Ready for Development at the moment it is accepted in to a sprint.

I hope this explanation helps you avoid unnecessary workflows!

"How many hours are in a Story Point? Pink. Because penguins don't like ice cream." -Amanda Babb in every conversation about hours and story points. 

While I use this example as a cheeky way to say the two methods of estimation (hours and story points) don't coincide, the reality, of course, is much more complex. Business and product teams typically think in terms of dates and schedules. Development and operations teams typically think in terms of level of effort. That's not to say story points and dates do not nor will ever coincide, it's a matter of how to speak each other's language. 

What is a Story Point?

Our Dragon of the West, Christopher Pepe, explained it well:  humans are terrible at numbers. That's why we have so many ways to express things without using numbers. For example, I have Big Dog (Leonard) and Tiny Dog (Howard). Tiny is small in comparison to Big Dog. However, at 50 pounds, he's not small compared to, say, a Chihuahua. This is what we call relative estimation in the agile world. This thing is larger or more complex than the other thing over there: it will take a larger level of effort to complete. 

Computers, on the other hand, are wonderful at numbers. It's part of the reason we invented them. In Jira Software, a story point is simply the numerical expression of a relative estimate. When we need to understand the level of effort of more than one thing, we aggregate the relative estimate into a total level of effort. This is known as the commit in a velocity chart. As we complete work, we burn down the level of effort until we understand what's left. At the end of a sprint, we determine whether we met our commit or not. The completion of the work over several sprints determines our velocity. From there, we can reasonably predict the level of effort we can complete during a sprint. 

Why can't a team estimate in hours? 

It's not a matter of can't. At Praecipio, we've seen many teams succeed well in estimating their level of effort in hours. However, this involved a significant effort to run time studies on routine tasks for the team. In a time study, an outside party will watch a person do a task and time it. Then watch them do it again...and again...and again. Then, the outside party watches another person perform the same task several times. The outside observer will continue with this until they feel they have sufficient data to make a reasonable assumption (read: average) of the time it takes to complete said task. Rinse and repeat for all tasks all personnel complete in a day and through out the week. 

Estimating in hours works well in repetitive work environments. The same tasks must be completed the same (or similarly enough) throughout the day and week. However, when we're thinking about software development, we all know this is rarely the case. What may seem like a simple feature request can become a significant effort when looking at how the new feature interacts with the rest of the services, modules, or products. Yes, we've done something similar before and it took four hours. But what has changed since the last time we implemented something similar? What else have we deployed? Did we change our methods? Are we integrating this with another system? Have the APIs been updated or changed? How many releases have been performed since the last time we did this? 

The shoulds and shouldn'ts of tracking time in Scrum

Why are teams being asked to track time when they estimate and understand level of effort in story points? In a word, Money. Under complex financial and regulatory practices, most businesses report quarterly earnings to regulatory bodies and markets. The best way a business has to gather and report this information is through complex financial systems that aggregate data from inputs across the organization. One of the more critical inputs? Time tracking. So how should we and shouldn't we track time in a scrum team? 

• You should establish the minimum time guideline such as 15-minute or 30-minute increments
• You should not expect accuracy down to the minute for a given task
• You should expect the team(s) to continue to estimate their level of effort in story points
• You should not make the team switch to hours to estimate their level of effort
• You should centralize where the team should track time
• You should not expect the user to log in to multiple tools to track time
• You should download our Lean Budgets White Paper which details different ways of managing the data and provides a solution in Jira Align
• You should not expect to implement a fundamental change in financial tracking and reporting across your organization without help

At Praecipio, we have implemented several solutions to this problem across industries and with all sizes of organizations. For help regarding how your teams can balance time tracking, scrum, and financial reporting, feel free to reach out to us!