Whether your business is a small, fast-growing agile shop, or a larger company that is trying to adopt agile methodologies, success hinges on a proper foundation of roles, responsibilities, and processes. In this talk, we’ll cover how Trulia tackles these areas, and discuss how JIRA Agile helped us expand our agile cycles.

1. #atlassian

2. Preparing Agile for Scale
Nate Van Dusen • Engineering Program Management Director • Trulia •

3. Agile Is for Everyone

4. Agile is for Everyone
“Enterprise” Agile is for companies of ALL sizes

5. Agile is for Everyone
• Enterprise Agile is for the entire company, not just Engineering

6. Agile is for Everyone
• Companies of any size can employ Agile principles to:
• Ensure success as the company, projects, and teams grow
• Optimize entire organizations, from the top down
Engineering
CTO
Dev VP’s
Finance
CFO
Finance
Leads
Product
Business
Unit VP’s
Product
Managers

7. The key to success is
creating scalable Agile
methodologies that
development teams and the
business can sustain as they
grow.

8. Familiar Challenges

9. Familiar Challenges
• Dependency Tracking
• Cross-team planning is difficult.
• Scrum of Scrums must be held!
• Facilitator and Team Reps must attend.
Scrum of
Scrums
Team 1
Team 2
Team 3
Team 4

10. Familiar Challenges
Managing Larger or Longer-Running Projects
• Proper Breakdown of Work
• You must create the ability to track from highest level business goal to sub-tasks.
Theme!
Epic!
Story/ Bug!
Task!

11. Familiar Challenges
Breaking down the work
The Theme provides the opportunity, business
value and high level sizing.
The Epic breaks the opportunities into
independent capabilities and are prioritized
based on business value.
The Story breaks the Epic into smaller
features, functions that can be delivered
within a sprint.
Stories also describe dependencies.
Theme
Story 1
Story 2
Story 3
Story 4
Epic 1
Epic 2
Task
The Sub-Task break the Story into work
that can be accomplished by a single engineer.
Task
Task
Sub-TTaska
sk
Task
Task
Task
Sub-TTaska
sk
Task
Task
Task
Sub-TTaska
sk
Task
Task
Task
Sub-TTaska
sk

12. In order to surmount the
challenges, businesses
must plan ahead. Don’t
wait till it’s too late!

13. Lay the Foundation

14. Lay the Foundation
Identify Persons to Fulfill Proper Roles
Product Owner
Scrum Master
Team Member

15. Lay the Foundation
Healthy Agile Ceremonies
• It’s important to ensure your teams have and respect required ceremonies
• Backlog Grooming
• Sprint Planning
• Daily Scrum
• Sprint Review
• Retrospective

16. Expansion of development
cycles and implementation
of product and business
Agile cycles are required for
success.

17. Prepare to Scale

18. Prepare to Scale
Consider Adding Additional Role
Area Product Owners can be useful when a business unit has a product or
products that contain many subject areas.
Product Owner
Scrum Master
Team Member
Area Product Owner

19. Prepare to Scale
Healthy Product Creation and Ideation
• It’s important to ensure your Product teams have healthy process
• Product Backlog creation
• This should be a backlog separate from the sprint/development backlog
• This should be a place to record all product ideas regardless of whether they will be
released or not (protects IP and reduces rework)
• This backlog should feed the sprint backlog in a frictionless way
• Many tools are about to come to market for a product/portfolio backlog
• Data from this backlog should be able to create a company roadmap to be used
everywhere in the business
• Quarterly Planning
• Quarterly planning cycles should exist to review work and present new ideas
• Ideas presented should be at the Theme and Epic level
• Engineering should be exposed to ideas presented ahead of time

20. Feed the Sprint backlog
with actionable Epics and
Stories.

21. Leveraging the Atlassian
Suite

22. SECTION TITLE 1
Let the tools help you!
• Using Epic’s is Vital
• Using epics and epic linking will let you distribute stories with across multiple teams while
maintaining visibility
• Use JIRA’s new Epic reporting to track Epic burndown
• Using Epics properly allows you to create valuable reporting for look backs and financial
reporting needs
• Use JIRA Agile!
• Utilize JIRA Reporting
• If you give JIRA the right data input the reporting you get out is valuable
• Track your teams burndown and use the new reporting to track quarterly trends

23. Leveraging the Atlassian Suite

24. Leveraging the Atlassian Suite
Let the tools help you!
• JIRA Auto Triggers Save Time!
• If your company uses Stash, using the new Auto Triggers saves a lot of time
• Auto Triggers can be set on many things, but the most simple and valuable is auto ticket
transitions
• Developers don’t have to go back and forth between tools
• Tickets transition automatically after pull request

25. Leveraging the Atlassian Suite

26. Agile needs to be a mindset
valued and embraced by all
aspects of the business.
Scaling Agile successfully
takes everyone.

27. Thank you!
Nate Van Dusen • Engineering Program Management Director • Trulia