Agile development routine follow-up Series II: burnout diagram (medium)

This is the second article in the routine follow-up series of agile development (topic directory ).

Target of iteration and burn-out diagram

The goal of a burn-out chart is to complete the iteration. What is the goal of the iteration?

1.Deliver the user stories planned in the plan according to the requirements of the product manager

2. Try to complete 1

Later, we will see that this definition is narrow and will be mentioned in later articles in the series.

Why can't a burned-out chart achieve this goal directly? Potential problems include:

1. If the burn-out diagram is completed on time, it may be to finish it on time and sacrifice the quality of all the stories (important and unimportant) in exchange for the progress.

2. If the burned-out diagram is not completed on time, it may not be that the story is not completed, but that the rest of the story is not completed, resulting in failure to deliver all the stories.

3. If the burned-out diagram is not completed on time, the story of incomplete completion may include some extremely important ones.

Looking at the form of a burned-out chart, it is impossible to identify the three in advance, which brings a lot of risks and is surprising at the end of the iteration.

What should we do?

"Step burnout diagram"

I have heard of this method before, but I have not found any images on the network.

The method is to cut the whole story suddenly when each story is completed, thus forming a step.

The downsides of a tiered combustion chart are also obvious: it is difficult to see the burning at the beginning, and even the arc shapes that have been arched up are covered up, some details are hard to remember.

Therefore, a solution is to mix a common burnout diagram with a tiered burnout diagram, that is, draw two lines at the same time.

"Follow-up chart"

The follow-up chart is created by some large teams. Because the team is huge, you cannot expect to review all the work in the last two hours of iteration. Therefore, you often finish one review, in this case, we need to assign a "follow-up person" to each job. If he is affiliated with the product department, he will stare at the "follow-up chart" to see if he has finished the work he cares about.

When providing consultation for a game company, the number of teams for one of their products was as high as 88 (the other was even 200 ), A huge follow-up image is hand-drawn on the wall. Every day the updates are dynamic, and even small icons are directly painted on paper. Once the painting is full every month, a new one is printed.

The following figure shows the follow-up chart of the Martian.

 

The green line in the figure is the traditional burn-out chart;

Every time a story is completed, there will be a blue mark and the name of the story to remind the followers to carry out on-site pre-review; if the story is not completed for a long time, the burning chart is still burning, you must have encountered the problem you mentioned before.

There is also a dark red line in the lower right, which is the "overflow time", that is, the Time Beyond the expected work time, indicating that a new task has occurred during this time; the new task is too early to appear, generally, the most important story is completed in the early stage of iteration, and new tasks should not be introduced. However, in the later stage, as the most important story is completed, reviewed, and reworked due to dissatisfaction, teams tend to better accomplish the most important tasks, rather than simply integrating all the stories. In product R & D, this often improves product value.

In practice, a company called guanglian da used the overflow time as a negative number to draw a picture, which is called "baseline sinking". That is to say, the place to go is not 0, but the negative number, is a good practice for similar purposes.

I tried it and it was good, that is, the chart increased and it was inconvenient to display, so I changed it back.

Such a follow-up chart looks very powerful, but there are still some problems that have not been solved:

1. What stories are being done? They have not been done yet. They have already started, but have not been completed ......?

2. What stories are left behind?

3. Have you ever started many stories at the same time? (This is the main reason why many stories have been started but cannot be completed)

4. Who is responsible for the follow-up?

Some problems need to be solved by the story board (panel), some need something called "follow-up table", and then we will come back to detail the story board.