Scrum of Scrums

Bringing JIRA & GreenHopper

to entire company
Wojciech Seliga
wojciech.seliga@spartez.com

Scenario

One major product with multiple Scrum teams

working on it (Scrum of Scrums)

Product split into several subsystems

Global product backlog

Team product backlogs

Monthly sprints (parallel...)

Internal releases every N sprints

Public releases every M internal releases

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Release Cycle
Marketing
Marketing Release
Release

Internal
Internal Release
Release

Sprint
Sprint

Sprint
Sprint

Sprint
Sprint

Internal
Internal Release
Release

Internal
Internal Release
Release

Sprint
Sprint

Sprint
Sprint

Sprint
Sprint

Sprint
Sprint

Team
Team A
A
Team
Team B
B
...
Team
Team N
N
Time

Requirements

Current Sprint Progress Tracking

Current Internal Release Progress Tracking

Current Marketing Release Progress Tracking

Measuring Progress in Story Points (done/all)

Trends
Per
Per Scrum
Scrum Team
Team

Per
Per Subsystem
Subsystem

Globally
Globally

GH take on Scrum of Scrums

GreenHopper allows you to nest child versions to provide flexibility in
Scrum project management. For example, you might want to group all
issues that need addressing in a major product version at the highest
level of a version hierarchy. Since you might have separate teams, each
working on different components that constitute this major product
version, you may wish to represent each of those components as an
immediate child ('component') version of the major product version. From
here, you may wish to break up a given component into sprints,
depending on the amount of work required to develop it. Therefore, each
of these sprints would be an immediate child ('sprint') version of its
respective 'component version'.
GH online documentation

Problems

Combinatorial explosion of Versions x Teams

Inability to aggregate easily results

Inability slice and dice backlogs (per team, per

component/subsystem)

Many reports base on issue count or hours

Trends need more love

Solution
Business Domain JIRA/GH Entity
Product
Team
Subsystem

Project
Component
Multi-Select Custom Field

Product Backlog

GH Project Backlog

Team Backlog

Component Backlog

Marketing Release

Top-Level Version

Internal Release

Mid-Level Version

Sprint

Bottom-Level Version
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Product Backlog
Product Backlog

Team B Product Backlog

Subsystem P Backlog

Story
Story 11

Story
Story 11

Story
Story 22

Story
Story 22

Story
Story 44

Story
Story 33

Story
Story 33

Story
Story 55

Story
Story 55

Story
Story 44

Story
Story 99

Story
Story 66

Story
Story 55

Story
Story 77

Story
Story 66

Story
Story 88

Story
Story 77

GH Component Board

Story
Story 10
10

Story
Story 88
Story
Story 99
Story
Story 10
10

GH Contexts
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Backlog Management

Live Demo

Progress & Trend Tracking

Sprint burndowns (hours, stories)

Internal release burndowns (stories)

Public release burndowns (stories)

Scheduled vs. unscheduled stories

Committed stories vs. stretch goals

Team Velocity Trends

10

Progress & Trends Tracking

Live Demo

11

Forgotten Small Thing

Hey, our parallel sprints are not so parallel...

Gosh, we need to modify GreenHopper itself

12

World is not perfect

Stories fixed in several releases

Unfinished work

Hierarchical versions are awesome, but ... JIRA

does not know about them
Sometimes GH behaviour is not what we
expect

13

Future

Rapid Board

Pluggable date strategies in GreenHopper

Executive Dashboard / Project Portfolio

Management
Automatic Velocity calculations

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Summary

GreenHopper is amazingly flexible

Think out of the box (or: the mapping is tricky)

Try to satisfy your needs by existing

functionality, write plugins if you really cannot
Dashboards and gadgets FTW
JIRA + GH works in Scrum of Scrums
environment pretty well

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Credits

Huge thanks to Lumesse Limited for allowing

me to talk about it publicly and use their prod
data
Many thanks to Mariusz Chrapko for his
creativity, great Scrum attitude and passion

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