Scaled Agility: The Project Forum

Name: Project Forum (Middle-out management structure) – Agile at Scale practice

When it might be appropriate

• In situations where multiple competing stakeholder groups with different agendas are required to work together
• In situations where multiple product groups need to collaborate on a bigger outcome
• Where there is a conflict in direction, resource management/ownership or scope between collaborating groups
• System of systems development

What is it?

The Project Forum is an application of agile philosophy to large project structures. Rather than impose a hierarchy of decision making from the Project Manager downwards the Project Forum is a virtual team in the middle of all stakeholders.

The Project Forum is a self-organising democratic group that balances competing voices and concerns, owns high level scope and architecture, runs the high level release train and performs integration activities for the product.

Use of the Project Forum practice does not prevent any communication directly between contributing groups it only provides a vehicle for that conversation when it’s relevant for the wider project.

The Project Forum practice is an example of Agile at Scale combining social business practices, technical software practices and ways of working to make a simple way of doing big complicated bits of work.

Simple software project measures

I’m not a big fan of metrics, measures, charts, reporting and data collection. I’m not terribly impressed by dashboards with 20 little graphs on showing loads of detailed information. When I’m involved in projects I want to know 3 simple things:

• How quick are we doing stuff?
• Are we on track or not?
• Is the stuff good enough quality?

There can be some deep science behind the answers to those questions but at the surface that’s all I want to see.

Organisations need to know that teams are delivering quality products at the right pace to fit the business need. To achieve this goal teams need to be able to demonstrate that their product is of sufficient quality and that they can commit to delivering the required scope within the business time scales. If the project goal may not be achieved then the business or the team need to change something (such as scope, resources or time scales). This feedback mechanism and the open transparent communication of this knowledge is key to the success of agile delivery.

The goal of delivering quality products at the right pace can be measured in many complex ways however, when designing the Project Forum agile at scale practice we looked at just 3 measures. In fact I should probably call them 2.5 measures as the throughput/release burnup can be considered mutually exclusive (if you’re continuous flow or iterative). The most important measure is people’s opinions when you go and talk to your team.

Note: in the measures section I often refer to “requirements” as a simple number, this could be a count, a normalised count, magnitude, points, etc. it doesn’t matter what’s used so long as it’s consistent.

Rational Quality Manager Beta 2

I hear that there will be a Rational Quality Manager Beta 2 released in about a week and half. Here’s my review of Beta 1

More info

See my first look at IBM Rational Requirements Composer here

See more stuff about Jazz in general here: What’s all that Jazz?

First Look: IBM Rational Quality Manager

Note this is from 2008, for a review of RQM in 2011 see CLM 2011 review

Yet again hats off the Jazz folks for making something consumable. With no effort involved I was able to download and install a Beta 2 of Rational Quality Manager (RQM) and login and get a default empty dashboard with no configuration at all 8)

RQM is a web based tool “for test planning, workflow control, tracking and metrics reporting capable of quantifying how project decisions and deliverables impact and align with business objectives.” It’s also Jazz based. A couple of weeks ago I did a First Look analysis of Rational Requirements Composer (here) so I thought I’d have a look at RQM today. I should caveat this by saying I’m not a QA/Test expert!

This being a Beta there are some bugs hanging around like the horizontal tabs having a higher z-order than the pop-up menus from the left navigation bar so you’ve got to be precise with the mouse to open the “My Test Plans” tab at the moment and it’s a little hard to create a new test plan :S If only the left menu bar auto scrolled down like the “related sites” links on the far right! Eventually I worked around this by constructing the URI to create a new test plan – https://localhost:9443/jazz/web/console/QM#action= com.ibm.rqm.planning.home.actionDispatcher&subAction=newTestPlan and just typing it into the browser address bar. I had this problem in FF and IE, anyway I’ve got a work around so off I go.

Here’s the blank empty GUI:

Once I got into the Test Plan editor I was able to start creating a structured Test Plan. I like this idea, as instead of a huge Word document with no structure here there are discreet sections with potentially seperate ownership. Obviously in my demo repository there are no requirements to hook into a test plan so I clicked the button to create one, this led me into the Rational Team Concert web interface 8)

Unfortunately I got quite a few errors in trying to save sections of my test plan, and also none of the editors for the various sections would let me type in them no matter how many times I hit the “Edit” link. The idea of structured test assets continues in the Test Case editor, although I had the same problems as with Test Plans here in terms of editing some of the content. I was however able to generate work items (which naturally I did twice) based on my test case and configured environments using the excellent lab management interface

Upon executing my generated work item the problem I found was that my test failed. There were no doughnuts to be had!

This being based on the Jazz platform there is of course a lot of reporting available (I shifted over to the sample Java PetStore test plan since there wasn’t enough data in my dummy project).

Conclusions

RQM gives you a fully web based quality management portal. The structured nature to managing test assets is a major improvement, and since this is Jazz based I’m sure it’s all deeply configurable for different ways of working and approaches to quality management and testing.

The integration of information from Team members, Test Plans, Test Cases, Test Scripts, Execution, Reports and Defects is seamless and intuitive, with requirements and defects being managed through the Rational Team Concert interface and of course the data is easily reported on.

I’d like to dig more into the integration with other tools such as Rational Team Concert, possibilities with Rational Requirements Composer and the relationship between process templates in these various tools. Not to mention migration paths from other QM/Test tools like the “classic” Rational tools and those from other vendors.

All in all it looks like an impressive, intuitive and powerful product but it’s an early access Beta and has quite a few bugs that can make playing with it a bit frustrating at the moment.

More info

See my first look at IBM Rational Requirements Composer here

See more stuff about Jazz in general here: What’s all that Jazz?