Presented with Debbie Femia and Tim O’Keefe on our experiences managing a robust DITA publishing pipeline using Agile Scrum methodologies.

1. Forming Agile/Scrum Teams to Manage DITA
July 20161
Stan Doherty (Stan.Doherty@SimpliVity.com)
Deborah Femia (Deborah.Femia@SimpliVity.com)
Timothy O'Keefe (Tim.OKeefe@SimpliVity.com)

2. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
AGENDA
Background: SimpliVity Corporation (Stan)
Rationale: why choose to manage DITA infrastructure with Scrum?
Logistics: how we set up the Scrum team (Tim)
DITA: what infrastructure goals did we tackle (Deborah)
Take-aways: what did I learn about doing scrummy DITA? (Stan)
Take-aways: what worked? what will we improve? (Tim)
Take-aways: what aspects of DITA infrastructure worked well in Scrum? (Deborah)
Wrap-up: Measure, adapt, iterate (Stan)

3. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
Important Disclaimer
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WHILE EFFORTS WERE MADE TO VERIFY THE COMPLETENESS AND ACCURACY OF THE
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GOVERNING THE USE OF SIMPLIVITY SOFTWARE.

4. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
BACKGROUND: SimpliVity Corporation (http://www.simplivity.com)
SimpliVity Hyperconvergence delivers enterprise performance, protection,
and resiliency, with greater economics and cost savings than public cloud.
1. HyperEfficient: 90% capacity savings across storage and backup combined.
2. HyperProtected: 60-seconds or less on average for local backup or restore of a
1 TB VM.
3. HyperSimple: 3 clicks to back up, restore, clone, or move a VM from a single
console.
4. HyperManageable: 60-seconds or less on average to create or update backup
policies for 1000s of VMs across dozens of remote sites from a single console.
5. HyperAvailable: Add or remove a local or remote SimpliVity system without
downtime, without interruption to local or remote backups, and without
reconfiguration of backup policies or IP addresses.

5. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
RATIONALE: Why choose to manage DITA infrastructure using a Scrum team?

6. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
RATIONALE: Why choose to manage DITA infrastructure using a Scrum team?
The benefits can vary per your Engineering organization
and where it is in its Agile/Scrum adoption.

7. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
RATIONALE: Why choose to manage DITA infrastructure using a Scrum team?
SCRUM TRADITIONALLegend:

8. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
RATIONALE: Why choose to manage DITA infrastructure using a Scrum team?
SCRUM TRADITIONALLegend:
ENGINEERING
SCRUM SCRUM SCRUM
INFRA
TECH PUBS DEPT

9. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
RATIONALE: Why choose to manage DITA infrastructure using a Scrum team?
1. Increased visibility and
accountability to DITA
stakeholders.
2. Excellent metrics on where
you are spending time.
3. Increased flexibility in shifting
priorities.
SCRUM TRADITIONALLegend:
ENGINEERING
SCRUM SCRUM SCRUM
INFRA
TECH PUBS DEPT
BENEFITS

10. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
RATIONALE: Why choose to manage DITA infrastructure using a Scrum team?
1. Increased visibility and
accountability to DITA
stakeholders.
2. Excellent metrics on where
you are spending time.
3. Increased flexibility in shifting
priorities.
SCRUM TRADITIONALLegend:
ENGINEERING
SCRUM SCRUM SCRUM
INFRA
TECH PUBS DEPT
ENGINEERING
SCRUM
SCRUM
SCRUM
INFRA
TECH PUBS DEPT
BENEFITS

11. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
RATIONALE: Why choose to manage DITA infrastructure using a Scrum team?
1. Increased visibility and
accountability to DITA
stakeholders.
2. Excellent metrics on where
you are spending time.
3. Increased flexibility in shifting
priorities.
4. Increased integration with
general Scrum culture in
Engineering. Function as a
peer team.
SCRUM TRADITIONALLegend:
ENGINEERING
SCRUM SCRUM SCRUM
INFRA
TECH PUBS DEPT
ENGINEERING
SCRUM
SCRUM
SCRUM
INFRA
TECH PUBS DEPT
BENEFITS BENEFITS

12. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
RATIONALE: Why choose to manage DITA infrastructure using a Scrum team?
1. Increased visibility and
accountability to DITA
stakeholders.
2. Excellent metrics on where
you are spending time.
3. Increased flexibility in shifting
priorities.
4. Increased integration with
general Scrum culture in
Engineering. Function as a
peer team.
SCRUM TRADITIONALLegend:
ENGINEERING
SCRUM SCRUM SCRUM
INFRA
TECH PUBS DEPT
ENGINEERING
SCRUM
SCRUM
SCRUM
INFRA
TECH PUBS DEPT
ENGINEERING
SCRUM
SCRUM
SCRUM
INFRA
BENEFITS BENEFITS

13. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
RATIONALE: Why choose to manage DITA infrastructure using a Scrum team?
1. Increased visibility and
accountability to DITA
stakeholders.
2. Excellent metrics on where
you are spending time.
3. Increased flexibility in shifting
priorities.
4. Increased integration with
general Scrum culture in
Engineering. Function as a
peer team.
5. Preserve what you can
of the infrastructure or
standards in place.
SCRUM TRADITIONALLegend:
ENGINEERING
SCRUM SCRUM SCRUM
INFRA
TECH PUBS DEPT
ENGINEERING
SCRUM
SCRUM
SCRUM
INFRA
TECH PUBS DEPT
ENGINEERING
SCRUM
SCRUM
SCRUM
INFRA
BENEFITS BENEFITS BENEFITS

14. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
RATIONALE: Why choose to manage DITA infrastructure using a Scrum team?
1. Increased visibility and
accountability to DITA
stakeholders.
2. Excellent metrics on where
you are spending time.
3. Increased flexibility in shifting
priorities.
4. Increased integration with
general Scrum culture in
Engineering. Function as a
peer team.
5. Preserve what you can
of the infrastructure or
standards in place.
SCRUM TRADITIONALLegend:
ENGINEERING
SCRUM SCRUM SCRUM
INFRA
TECH PUBS DEPT
ENGINEERING
SCRUM
SCRUM
SCRUM
INFRA
TECH PUBS DEPT
ENGINEERING
SCRUM
SCRUM
SCRUM
INFRA
BENEFITS BENEFITS BENEFITS
COMMUNITIES
OF PRACTICE

15. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
LOGISTICS: How we set up the Scrum team?
What the heck is Agile Scrum anyway?
•Agile is a way of thinking about work.
•Scrum is a framework for developing complex products.
• Scrum was created by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber.
• Think of Agile as how to cook and Scrum as a particular recipe.
•Empowers teams to self-organize and determine how to complete work.
•Scrum draws from Lean Manufacturing + customer feedback.
•Encourages transparency, reflective behavior, and incremental changes
that enable teams to work more effectively.
•Scrum is most common implementation (Kanban, Lean Startup).
•http://www.scrumguides.org/
Typical Scrum Teams
• Scrum Master, Product Owner, and 5-8 team members.
• Self-organized and empowered to make decisions.
• Participate in daily standups.
• Work from a backlog.
• Implement, inspect and adapt their work.

16. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
LOGISTICS: How we set up the Scrum team?
Downers and Challenges
•All writers assigned to at least one scrum team.
• Fractional assignments and lack of resources for INFRA projects.
Uppers and Excitement
•Writers were already working on INFRA projects, but this was invisible.
• Scrum helped bring clarity and measure to these efforts.
Things that helped get us there
•Company investment and commitment to scrum.
• Team members managers willing to adopt these ways of working.
• Hired experienced Scrum Masters trained new ones.
•External training and guest speakers.
•Onsite scrum coach and internal training.
•Scrum of scrums.
•Organizations: Agile New England and Agile Boston.

17. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
LOGISTICS: How we set up the Scrum team?
What does a Doc Infrastructure team do?
•It does not create end user content.
•Infrastructure stories: integrating CCMS with Support, tooling changes, etc.
•Editorial, authoring, and production standards.
•Information Architecture standards: context help source markup.
•Collaboration resources: templates, wiki pages, and training.
Staffing Assignments
•Created core INFRA team from within the existing doc department.
•Core team members allocate 50% of their time to INFRA tasks and stories.
•Extended team members float, and assist as they can throughout the sprint.
• Swarming is important.
What does a doc infra scrum master do?
• Schedules and facilitates meetings
• Standup, planning, retrospective
• Created email list and Jira board
• Socialize the team’s role to the rest of the organization

18. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
DITA: What infrastructure goals did we tackle?

19. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
DITA: What infrastructure goals did we tackle?
Incremental transform improvements
•Based on an excellent foundation of a plugin created before moving to scrum
•Small, encapsulated changes to PDF and WebHelp styling
•Roll outs of new and upgraded tools

20. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
DITA: What infrastructure goals did we tackle?
Incremental transform improvements
•Based on an excellent foundation of a plugin created before moving to scrum
•Small, encapsulated changes to PDF and WebHelp styling
•Roll outs of new and upgraded tools
Publishing pipeline improvements
•Significant changes to automated builds
•Broken down into manageable tasks in sequence

21. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
DITA: What infrastructure goals did we tackle?
Incremental transform improvements
•Based on an excellent foundation of a plugin created before moving to scrum
•Small, encapsulated changes to PDF and WebHelp styling
•Roll outs of new and upgraded tools
Publishing pipeline improvements
•Significant changes to automated builds
•Broken down into manageable tasks in sequence
Release-related tasks
•End of release clean-up, verification, publishing, branching tasks

22. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
DITA: What infrastructure goals did we tackle?
Incremental transform improvements
•Based on an excellent foundation of a plugin created before moving to scrum
•Small, encapsulated changes to PDF and WebHelp styling
•Roll outs of new and upgraded tools
Publishing pipeline improvements
•Significant changes to automated builds
•Broken down into manageable tasks in sequence
Release-related tasks
•End of release clean-up, verification, publishing, branching tasks
Information Engineering team standards creation
•Authoring spec
•Context-sensitive Help standards / ID management system
•Style standards

23. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
TAKE-AWAYS: What did I learn about doing scrummy DITA?
Don't cheat: Follow Scrum principles as faithfully as possible:
Ceremonies -- grooming, planning, standups, reviews, retros
Backlog management and metrics
Team member commitment

24. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
TAKE-AWAYS: What did I learn about doing scrummy DITA?
Don't cheat: Follow Scrum principles as faithfully as possible:
Ceremonies -- grooming, planning, standups, reviews, retros
Backlog management and metrics
Team member commitment
Minimize role confusion: Transition …
Traditional roles (Manager, Information Architect, Team Lead, IC) . . . to . . .
Scrum roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Team member).

25. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
TAKE-AWAYS: What did I learn about doing scrummy DITA?
Don't cheat: Follow Scrum principles as faithfully as possible:
Ceremonies -- grooming, planning, standups, reviews, retros
Backlog management and metrics
Team member commitment
Minimize role confusion: Transition …
Traditional roles (Manager, Information Architect, Team Lead, IC) . . . to . . .
Scrum roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Team member).
Focus on crisp team charters: Build Scrum teams around specific goals:
Infrastructure/standards
Content development (typically integrated with feature development scrum teams)
Sustaining
Release management (Release Notes, KB articles, Sustaining)

26. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
TAKE-AWAYS: What did I learn about doing scrummy DITA?
Don't cheat: Follow Scrum principles as faithfully as possible:
Ceremonies -- grooming, planning, standups, reviews, retros
Backlog management and metrics
Team member commitment
Minimize role confusion: Transition …
Traditional roles (Manager, Information Architect, Team Lead, IC) . . . to . . .
Scrum roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Team member).
Focus on crisp team charters: Build Scrum teams around specific goals:
Infrastructure/standards
Content development (typically integrated with feature development scrum teams)
Sustaining
Release management (Release Notes, KB articles, Sustaining)
Inspect and adapt: Always a work in progress; learn from failures; persist.

27. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
LOGISTICS: What worked? What will we improve?
Things that worked well
•Creating the Doc Infrastructure team worked well.
•Swarming.
•Enabling people to opt-in.
•Pipeline for engineers to draft content.
•Overcome problem of having more work to do than dedicated people.
•Bringing visibility to all of the work the doc group does.
•Creating stories when gaps are identified.
Things that required incremental improvement
•Initially tried to have a story captain for every story.
•Bringing clarity to the definition of the team.
• Where do impediments get resolved?
•Velocity is not stable because of fluctuating team size.
•Struggle to identify time allocation for this team.

28. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
DITA: What aspects of the DITA infrastructure worked well here?

29. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
DITA: What aspects of the DITA infrastructure worked well here?
Manageable, sequenced, prioritized tasks
•Help to organize way of working

30. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
DITA: What aspects of the DITA infrastructure worked well here?
Manageable, sequenced, prioritized tasks
•Help to organize way of working
Visible / transparency
•Infra. tasks previously carried out behind the scenes
•Helps to quantify time/effort needed for Infra. tasks vs. other tasks

31. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
DITA: What aspects of the DITA infrastructure worked well here?
Manageable, sequenced, prioritized tasks
•Help to organize way of working
Visible / transparency
•Infra. tasks previously carried out behind the scenes
•Helps to quantify time/effort needed for Infra. tasks vs. other tasks
Story comments in JIRA serve as a logical means for…
•Team discussion
•Easy-to-find reporting of conclusions

32. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
DITA: What aspects of the DITA infrastructure worked well here?
Manageable, sequenced, prioritized tasks
•Help to organize way of working
Visible / transparency
•Infra. tasks previously carried out behind the scenes
•Helps to quantify time/effort needed for Infra. tasks vs. other tasks
Story comments in JIRA serve as a logical means for…
•Team discussion
•Easy-to-find reporting of conclusions
It’s nice to see all that your team has accomplished!

33. Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure
WRAP-UP: Measure, adapt, iterate