This is my presentation that I gave at the Risk track at the Lean Software and Systems Conference 2011, May 3-6 at Long Beach

1. Class Of Service For Managing Risk In Innovative New Product Dev Siddharta Govindaraj [email_address] Sreekanth Tadipatri [email_address]

2. Siddharta Govindaraj Director, Silver Stripe Software Pvt Ltd Email: [email_address] Twitter: @toolsforagile Sreekanth Tadipatri Senior Consultant, DeccanTech Email: [email_address] Twitter: @bugbasher

3. Not all features are equal

5. Example feature types Login : Well understood feature Subscription : Well understood, high value feature Game mechanics : Is it fun? High uncertainty User Interface : High technology uncertainty

6. The degree of feature newness Newness to the Company Newness to the target customers New-to-the-world High Low Reduced Costs Repositioning 20% 26% 10% 7% 26% Low High 11% New Lines Revisions / Improvements

7. Functionality Well Understood High Uncertainty Commodity Market Uncertainty Technical Uncertainty

8. Commodity Market Uncertainty Technology Uncertainty

10. Basic Performance Excitement Take pictures, browse and delete pictures, autofocus File formats, camera modes, pre-set settings Image quality, resolution, changable lens, underwater use

12. Expedite Emergency Bug

13. Class of Service Criteria Expedite Emergency bug fixes that need to be fixed and deployed in a few days Fixed Date Features that have a fixed deadline High Uncertainty Features exposed to market or technical uncertainty. Basic Basic features from the Kano model High Value Differentiating features from the Kano model Investment Intangible, long term improvements, to be picked up during times of slack Normal Everything else

14. Expedite * Only for emergency bug fixes * Moves to the head of backlog and all queues * Can override work in progress limits * Team members stop whatever they are working on and swarm to complete this work item

15. High Uncertainty * High market or technology risk * Focus on cheap prototype * Skip automated test stage

16. High Value * Requires user experience stage * Requires additional automated tests * Requires additional manual exploratory tests

17. Benefits Better business – development alignment Risk oriented view of the backlog

18. Risk Oriented Pull Policy For commodity features, we focus on business value For uncertainty, we need to focus on risk mitigation

19. To mitigate product risk, focus on learning Market Risk: Make cheap prototypes and validate them with your target market Technology Risk: Spike early to understand technical challenges Don't (yet) worry about quality or delivering every sprint

20. Jeff Patton's Chess Analogy © Jeff Patton

21. Risk oriented view What if you have many high uncertainty items on the backlog?

22. Risk oriented view What is the mixture of basic, linear and differentiating work items?

23. Risk oriented view Can we amortize highly risky features over a period of time by breaking them down into smaller pieces and tackle them one by one?

24. Risk oriented view Should we balance a release containing a high uncertainty feature with well understood basic features?

25. Risk oriented view What is the long term impact of having too many expedite requests?

26. Questions? Siddharta Govindaraj Director, Silver Stripe Software Pvt Ltd Email: [email_address] Twitter: @toolsforagile Sreekanth Tadipatri Senior Consultant, DeccanTech Email: [email_address] Twitter: @bugbasher

27. Picture Credits http://www.flickr.com/photos/twicepix/4837076726/sizes/l/ Ian Lamont http://ilamont.blogspot.com