The realities of working in an enterprise (distributed teams, multiple stakeholders, etc) present a series of challenges when trying to plan and scale agile development. Learn how Rosetta Stone knit together a dozen existing JIRA Agile boards into a coherent program-level view of their Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) release train using JIRA Portfolio – without sacrificing team autonomy.

1. ERIC HILFER • VP OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING• ROSETTA STONE LTD • @EricHilfer1
Managing Scaled Agile at
Rosetta Stone

2. Agenda
AGILE DEVELOPMENT
SCALED AGILE
SCALED AGILE WITH JIRA
WHAT WE ACCOMPLISHED!

3. http://paulnoth.com

4. Autonomy
The team is in charge.
Self-organizing to solve challenges.
Respect and Honesty
Trust your experts, and foster a safe
environment to deliver bad news
early, when it’s actionable.
What do we
like about
Agile?
Lean
Continuous delivery of real, working
software.

5. Why Scale?
Larger Deliverables Multiple Teams Alignment
• Ramp up large, coherent
initiatives
• Dependencies
• Hand-offs
• Release Plan
• Tracking
• Predicting
• Adapting

6. Do No Harm!
(No engineers were harmed while scaling this organization)

7. The Scaled Agile
Framework
(SAFe)

8. Three levels of practice

12. Why use JIRA Software for agile
development?
It’s already there! Ecosystem Distributed Teams Flexible
• Best in class defect tool
• Avoid migration to
dedicated agile toolset
• Great price point
• Engineering-friendly
plugins
• Confluence
• HipChat
• Built for collaboration • The good news: it’s
highly configurable!
• The bad news: it’s
highly configurable!

13. How does it work in
practice?

14. Portfolio Kanban
Funnel for business Epics, with Agile
Estimates plugin for in-board Epic
sizing
Portfolio for JIRA
Team Board in
Context
Multi-team rollup for planning and
tracking
Agile boards with ScriptRunner plugin
to share Epics across teams
Essential
Portfolio and
Program
Practices

15. IMAGE SOURCE: http://scaledagileframework.com/business-epic-kanban/!
Portfolio Kanban Board

17. Epic Workflow
• Define Transitions
• Need sufficient Admin Rights
• Apply to all Epics

18. View, edit, epic-level sizing from
Kanban board
Distributed planning poker
Agile Estimates Plugin
Add Story Points Field to
Epics
Epic sizing in rough story
points

20. Portfolio for JIRA
Multiple Project View Planning Tracking
• Consolidated view of multiple
JIRA projects
• Resource skillsets across all
teams
• Size large chunks of work
• Load balance across sprints
and multiple teams
• Create realistic release plan
• Roll-up progress to release-
level
• Stay in synch with team-level
reality
• Adapt early
• Clear view for stakeholders

21. Setting up teams

22. Setting up releases

23. • Group by team or person
• Color by Theme or Workstream
• Show progress or and dependenci
es
Epic Plan

24. Viewing progress

25. Capacity utilization

27. What’s Next? A glimpse of Portfolio for JIRA V2!

28. What we accomplished
Alignment Coordination Transparency
• Building the right things!
• 12-week view of planned
work
• Balancing work to real
capacity
• Anticipating hand-offs and
delivering them smoothly
• Dependency tracking across
teams
• Clear, agreed-upon release
objectives
• Program-level view of
progress and impediments
• Ability to respond while
there’s still time!

29. Thank you!
ERIC HILFER • VP OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING• ROSETTA STONE LTD • @EricHilfer1