Agile Development Blog

For me RallyON was one of those – you know what, I am living my dream – moments in life. My favorite town (Boulder) was filled with 150 of our largest and best customers along with 85 expert agile practitioners from our coaching, product and technical account management teams. It was a swarm of agile expertise all gathered to share with each other for the sole purpose of getting smarter and building community. And you know what?

It turned out great! We prepared very well, the whole company came together to support it and all the right people were there. Typical for Colorado, the weather was perfect on day one (see the video below), but snowed on day two. Check out the runners pictured on top of Mount Sanitas in Boulder for our charity run with the white streaks of snow on May 11th! Fortunately, many folks also joined the Yoga class inside and we ended up donating 260 meals to our non-profit partner, Community Food Share, during the corporate challenge month.

Don’t just trust me

Please don’t just trust my words about this being a great conference! Below are a few of the artifacts from the conference including a quick video, the conference community site, links to twitter stream from the conference tag #RallyOn11 and great questions posed to StackExchange. But, the most stunning artifact is that 99% of  of the attendees surveyed said they would attend again and recommend it to another member of their team.

To give you a little taste of the setting and the energy, PLAY the video to hear a collective answer to: WHAT IS AGILE?

If you are interested in what happened at RallyON, view the Twitter archive, join the discussion, download the presentations or read the notes at the RallyOn.Rallydev.com site by clicking on the banner below. To comment or participate, simply login with your Rally username and password or create an account if you don’t have Rally credentials.

A HUGE THANK YOU

The overwhelming success of this two day event could not have happened without tons of help. A huge thank you to:

• our customers who showed up ready to learn and share – as well as present over 100 open space topics
• our product, technical account management and coaching teams for kicking day one off with Rally developed content
• Ken Clyne and Ann Konkler for being a fantastic pair in the master of ceremonies role
• our partners Accurev and StreamStep for sponsoring the event
• our internal team RallyOn for nailing the execution of this event
• Michael Cheveldave from Cognitive Edge for facilitating a track on Cynefin and complex adaptive systems
• StackExchange for sending Mark and Anna to help us ramp up in that community
• all the attendees to entered or answered questions at pm.stackexchange.com using the RallyON11 tag

I kicked off the conference by saying this was all about building a strong community. By bringing our best users together with all of our internal agile experts, it was my hope that we could address some of the problems that Jean, Eric and Liz highlighted in late 2009 with their Community of Thinkers post. And, also to run some experiments based on the shortcomings that we highlighted in the #10yrsagile celebration conference and my post. Based on feedback, usage of the RallyON community site and the excitement from the show, I think we got a community snowball rolling toward the crest of the hill.

Please let us know how you thought we did, either physically or virtually, at the conference, and share your ideas for how we can continue building our community.

Ryan Martens is CTO/Founder of Rally and on the way to be the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Unreasonable Institue this summer in Boulder –  See the Institutes 2011 Fellows – Watch the intro video to the Institute .

In conjunction with the Lean Software & Systems conference this week, Rally is releasing a powerful Enterprise Kanban Board that provides a simple way to visualize the status and flow of work through a software project.

The addition of full, enterprise Kanban support to Rally’s Agile ALM platform provides users with an elegant visualization of work across projects, teams and the entire organization. It can be customized for each project, allowing users to choose which Kanban states are displayed and which states are mapped to Rally’s core schedule states. This allows teams to model their unique processes within Rally and view rollup reports between teams — providing complete visibility into the quality, status and progress of projects.

The Enterprise Kanban Board allows users to:

• drag-and-drop ranking and state changes
• block and unblock stories
• visually flag each story with user-defined states
• customize WIP (Work-in-Progress) limits with color-coded status indicators
• display stories and/or defects
• edit ready-to-pull or blocked items

Cycle/Lead Time and Throughput reports provide valuable metrics around how many work items are completed in a given time period or the average time that it takes a work item to pass from one state to another. The new Enterprise Kanban Board can be installed by clicking the + icon on the Rally menu and then choosing the Kanban Board from the App Catalog. And, if you have been using our current Kanban App, here are instructions on how to convert those stories to the new Kanban board.

In this video, I’ll demo the full enterprise Kanban support Rally is now offering within Rally Enterprise and Rally Unlimited Editions.

Todd Olson is the VP of Products at Rally Software. He is a marathon runner and cake baker. You can find Todd on Twitter at @tolson.

Next week we are running a fun experiment in Boulder, as we host our first users conference: RallyOn 2011. We are experimenting with a number of things as we learn how to engage, connect, and contribute to our growing world-wide customer community.

First, we are trying to leverage social technologies in a number of ways to reach users all around the world. One way we are doing this is by using Stack Exchange, the Internet’s leading community-driven Q&A engine, to meld a community of agile software development and program management experts. Conceivably, this could kick-off a new paradigm in professional conferences, attaining the elusive goal of extending the conference experience of networking, knowledge sharing and community into the online environment with virtual attendees, and living long after the closing session.

We invited representatives from Stack Exchange to join the conference, promoting and shepherding the community experience. As a result, two members from the Programmers and Project Management communities will be in attendance, sponsored by Stack Exchange. Mark and Anna, who have coauthored this post, have already brought guidance and energy to the interactions between communities, and are sure to do so during RallyOn, as these two communities closely align with the goals of the conference and the interests of our attendees.

Cool stuff about Stack Exchange that I bet you did not know:
You may be familiar with Stack Exchange’s most popular site, Stack Overflow, the flagship software programming Q&A site that receives tens of millions of visitors each month. However, the vision far exceeds that single site. Since August 2010, the company has launched 49 new vertical-oriented Q&A sites. By building vibrant communities of experts around specific topics, Stack Exchange is able to facilitate answers to 94% of all questions network-wide.

• Questions generally average 10 answers, giving you different insights and approaches to tackling problems or issues.
• Answers are peer-reviewed by experts within the community, with those answers receiving the most positive votes rising to the top, guaranteeing the most accurate, relevant or acceptable answer to even the most difficult question.
• Optimized for search engines, these answers help hundreds if not thousands of other people who are seeking answers to similar questions on the web.
• The experts forge a community of subject matter enthusiasts, earning reputation and recognition for their contributions through the reputation point system.

At Rally, we have a fantastic marketing department that puts on great regional events and huge webinars, but we have never done a users conference. However, we are not sure what the best model for our users conference should be. So we are bringing a community of experts and Agile enthusiasts together around the RallyOn 2011 conference. With the help of two enthusiastic Stack Exchange members to showcase the power and benefits of a community-driven Q&A network like Stack Exchange, we are excited about adding a whole new group of Agile experts to our current communities.

To help track the success of this endeavor, we’ve created a special RallyOn11 tag on each Stack Exchange site. Please tag your questions with this tag and also include it in your profile. Participation is a snap, and we’ll be there at the conference to give you a hand.

While exploring the Stack Exchange sites, check out the RallyOn11 tag to discover peers with similar questions and interests. We’ll also be streaming live feeds from the sites directly to a monitor at the conference, allowing you to observe the community’s activity in real-time.

What’s in it for you?

• As a director, the sites give your team an existing resource to crowd-source problems and find solutions from a group of subject matter experts.
• As a director, the Project Management community often addresses management level problems including those involving other managers, executives and team members.
• As an Agile coach or internal champion, these sites are a resource your customers can turn to stay on the right track.
• As an Agile coach or internal champion, you can build your reputation and find inspiration for new ways of approaching issues.
• As a developer, you can find answers to programming problems, project management concerns or challenges interacting with management.

Find Me at RallyOn!

Community: Programmers
Programmers attracts software development experts with interests in subject areas such as development methodologies, architecture practices, and algorithm and data structure concepts. It evolved out of the flagship Stack Overflow site when it became apparent that a separate place to ask questions about general software development concepts and programmers’ professional development, rather than specific implementation details, was needed. An example of this type of question can be found here.

Anna Lear (@aalear) is joining us from the programmers community, and is one of the community’s respected moderators.

Find Me at RallyOn!

Community: Project Management
Project Management covers a wide array of topics including: learning and implementing project management, challenges in managing projects and people (as well as challenges with project managers) and specific techniques and best practices from different methodologies. Project management approaches discussed include Agile, Waterfall, the PMBOK Guide, PRINCE2, ITIL and mish-mash of methodology that often gets implemented in the real world.

Mark Phillips (@mpmobile) is joining us from the project management community, having been a member of that community since its earliest days.

Ryan Martens is a member of NRDC’s Environmental Entrepreneurs, founder/CEO of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder/CTO at Rally Software Development.

In last week’s blog “Rationale for Project Stratus”, Ryan stated “The model articulated in Dean Leffingwell’s newest book, ”Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements, Practices for Teams, Programs and the Enterprise“ is clearly one of the patterns of agile strategic planning.”

In this post, I want to expand on how we reached that conclusion.

I’ll start by introducing Chad Holdorf, Agile Coach and earlyvangelist for Project Stratus. Chad has been guiding Project Stratus in support of Dean’s model. Take a look at what you get with such customer collaboration: http://www.scaledagiledelivery.com/2011/04/22/agile-portfolio-planning/

Now on to how we got there:

As mentioned in the “The Making of Project Stratus” blog, we have been diligently following a customer development process based on Steven Blank’s model. Because the book focuses on startups, we adapted the model to existing companies (like Rally) wanting to deliver new solutions to their market, but one aspect that applies to both is a ruthless search for a handful (3 to 5) of what Blank calls “earlyvangelists”.

Earlyvangelists are customers that have these particular characteristics:

1. Has a problem
2. Is aware of having a problem
3. Has been actively looking for a solution
4. Has put together a solution of piece parts
5. Has or can acquire a budget

#4 and #5 are of key importance: Earlyvangelists have more than just the problem. They have it, want to solve it, already are trying something less than ideal, and have the availability and organizational authority to garner the resources to do something more about it.

With Project Stratus, we found many many customers have the problem (unrealistic roadmaps, poor visibility into development status of marketable features, lack of alignment between business goals and feature work). There is no doubt Rally has a responsibility to the market to produce an agile strategic planning solution. The challenge is finding earlyvangelists that can guide a successful solution to that problem.

We have been grateful to locate a handful of earlyvangelists: customers who have installed the Stratus preview application with their roadmap data, run their planning process for real with it and kept my inbox interesting with plenty of “Catherine, this is great but I need X to really make it work for us.”

If you are attending our RallyON conference on May 10 and 11, you’ll get to meet Chad. If not, track the Scaled Agile Delivery videos he has posted on his site. Thanks Chad for contributing so actively to Project Stratus!

As you can tell, it takes a while to get to the commercial product the right way to ensure the product will be a success for both Rally and its customers.

As we work at delivering the first release of our agile strategic planning product to support the first identified pattern, we are working with other Chads – Nina, Jeff, Dale, and others – to further our study of strategic planning patterns that would warrant product support. Please stay tuned.

Catherine Connor is a Product Marketing Director at Rally Software. She focuses on leveraging agile and lean values for the product manager role. She is the lead for Project Stratus.