1. Joint Release and Business Iteration Planning
in a Large Scale Agile Project – F-Secure’s experience
Gabor Gunyho
Lean Change Agent
2010-09-17
Protecting the irreplaceable | f-secure.com

2. About F-Secure
• Company
• Founded in 1988, listed on NASDAQ OMX Helsinki, market cap ca 340m€
• Headquartered in Helsinki, 18 country offices, presence in more than 100 countries
• 840+ people, 300+ in R&D, 5 offices in 4 countries, Agile transformation since 2003
• Products and Services
• Online Security: Anti-malware, e-mail filter, Browsing Protection, Parental Control
• Content Protection: Online Backup, Anti-theft
• Online Storage and Services: Storage Platform, Sharing, Social Media Access
• Multiple OS platforms (Win, Mac, Linux, mobile), 20+ language versions
• Customers
• Consumers (retail, reseller, e-store), millions of homes
• Operators, world leader with 200+ operator partners
• Corporate
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3. About the project #1
• Major new product
• significant changes in some business models, architecture and
development approach i.e.,
new Release and Business Iteration Planning method *)
• Planning Scope: Business Iteration (BI) = 90 days (original)
• BI Planning Events: first a 3-day workshop then 2 days
• Attendants: ~120 (ca 13-14 teams)
• Venue: Exhibition hall
• Facilitator: originally Dean Leffingwell and the internal Continuous
Improvement Support (CIS) team, later CIS team only
• Events conducted so far: all together 5 since December 2009
*) based on Dean Leffingwell’s model the “Agile Release Train”
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4. About the project #2
• Legacy product with less development effort
• significant changes in team setup and development approach i.e.,
new Release and Business Iteration Planning method
• Planning Scope: Business Iteration (BI) = 60 days
• BI Planning Events: 2-day workshops
• Attendants: ~16 to 20 (2 to 3 teams)
• Venue: conference room in the office
• Facilitator: internal Continuous Improvement Support (CIS) team
• Events conducted so far: 2 since June 2010
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5. Why planning?
“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
“Plans change very easily. Worldly affairs do not always go according to a plan
and orders have to change rapidly in response to a change in circumstances.
If one sticks to the idea that once set, a plan should not be changed, a
business cannot exist for long.”
Taiichi Ohno
Probability of
meeting date
(%)
100
0
Time
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6. Why joint Business Iteration planning sessions?
““We need to improve the way how we manage our requirements, and especially
how we create concept (release) plans and link longer term architecture into our
short term plans“ Pirkka Palomäki, CTO
• We need to plan a large iteration with many teams, much
complexity, and lots of dependencies
• Share information across the whole project
• Deal with risks
• Deal with impediments
• Find and deal with dependencies
• Align teams to a common objective
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7. “Value Items” – layers of abstraction in content
•Epics are broader, long-term things,
Roadmap
Sol/Tech
Epic
typically do not fit in a release
Feature
•Features do not fit in an iteration
Solution BL
• but they do fit in a release
Story
•Stories must be small enough to fit into
an iteration
Iteration
•Tasks are not “Value Items” per se
Task
BL
• they belong to the iteration Backlog
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8. Project Cadence – layers of abstraction in time
• Fixed iteration length for all teams (2 weeks)
• Iterations are synchronized
• Planning and demo days and
internal releases are synchronized
• Business Iteration: 60 days
• Release to Manufacturing (eg) in 2, 3 or 4 BIs
Beta1 Beta2 RTM
2w
B B B
I I1 I2 I3 I4 I I5 I6 I7 I8 I I9 I10 I11 I12
P P P
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9. Preparing for the Business Iteration Planning event
 Planning scope and context,  Commitment and availability
i.e., business and tech vision of business owners, product
owners, technology owners
 High level BI content: epics and other key stakeholders
and features (in priority
 Tooling capabilities, i.e.,
order)
engineering environment and
 Project cadence, i.e., BI and backlog tooling
iteration length, schedule,  Facilitation for the planning
events (planning and demo event
days) and beta releases
 Event venue and logistics
 Team setup and teams’ (place, furnishing, AV,
availability for the planning equipment, catering etc)
event (collocated)
 Teams’ capability for agile
planning and Team’s capacity
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10. Agenda for the joint BI planning event, day 1
• Introduction (30min)
• Project setup (15min)
• Visions for (2,5h)
• Business/content
• Architecture
• User eXperience and UI
• Engineering practices
• Confidence vote on the input
• Planning process intro (30min)
• Planning (4h) – team breakout sessions
• Scrum-of-Scrums (SoS) and Architecture SoS alternating in every hour,
includes risk and issue handling
• Draft Plan review (30 min)
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11. Agenda for the joint BI planning event, day 2
• Status check (15 min)
• Planning (4-5h) – team breakout sessions
• Scrum-of-Scrums (SoS)
and Architecture SoS
as before
• Final plan review (1,5h)
• Confidence vote
(5 minutes “thumb voting”)
• Retrospective
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12. Building the Business Iteration Plan
• Get team capacity per • Load stories on your sprints
iteration until you run out of capacity
• in team’s own unit • Negotiate/gain agreement/
• Identify Stories/Backlog restate BI objectives for your
Items team
• Derive stories from Features to • Identify impediments and
meet vision/objectives risks
• Estimate stories • Identify any hard dates
• Split any story bigger than X • Prepare to present your plan
• Identify and discuss • Help-desk is there for the
interdependencies teams:
• Other teams, IT, UX, etc • User experience experts,
business managers,
• Check regularly on coverage architects, etc
of features by the stories
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13. Considerations in Building the Plan
• Include bug-fixing time and maintenance load
• Include effort for releasing
(eg beta release)
• Include holidays, training and
company events (if any)
• Include some realistic
allocation for surprises
• Identify and include effort for
• Infrastructure build-up
Note: shared infra build-up
needs to track ahead
• Improvement ideas
• Architectural issues
• Automated Testing
• Non-functional Requirements
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14. As a result the teams will have
• Features and all other work broken down to stories
• Allocated the stories to iterations within capacity.
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15. And the whole project will have
• Master wall that shows which team works on which
feature in which iteration
• List of identified risks and impediments
• ROAMed - Resolved, Owned, Accepted, Mitigated
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16. Conclusions
• Business Iteration for steering in mid-term time scale
• Higher levels of abstraction in the “Value item” hierarchy
• Planning for the Business Iteration with the features and epics
• For both larger (13-14 teams) and smaller (2-3 teams) settings
Better visibility and steerability for business
management
• External facilitation is a must, start with an experienced expert
• Evolve the method as you go, eg
• Scrum-of-Scrums within the planning, including continuous risk,
dependency and impediment handling
• Stakeholder help-desk
• Master wall and feature coverage tracking, etc
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17. Questions?
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