IBM Bluemix : Using DevOps Services & tools to Manage Cloud Applications - Part 2

b. Plan and track work for agile team collaboration

1. Bluemix DevOps Services - Track & Plan supports typical activities conducted during agile projects, such as backlog management, sprint planning, and daily scrums

2. Understand work items in Track & Plan like epic, story, task, and defect

On an agile project, features to implement are captured in a product backlog, then the team identifies the work for the next Sprint in the Sprint Backlog. A set of hands-on steps are provided to show some key concepts in Track & Plan.

a. Enable Agile Planning and Tracking on a project:

Depending on how IBM Bluemix DevOps Services projects have been created, the Agile Planning and Tracking capability may not be enabled. First verify that agile planning and tracking is enabled for your project.

 On your IBM Bluemix DevOps Services project, click the Settings button

 On the left pane of the Settings page, click OPTIONS. Verify that the Track & Plan capability is enabled, and that the Scrum development feature has been added to the project. (if not, this is because the option was not selected when the project was created or forked from another project.):

 When Agile Tracking and Planning is enabled, click the TRACK & PLAN button on the top of the screen. You are now ready to plan your work using the Scrum approach.

b. Prepare the Product Backlog The product backlog is a prioritized features list containing short descriptions of all functionality desired in the product.

Add work items to the Backlog

 On the left pane of the Track & Plan page, select Backlog.

 At this point the backlog is empty and needs to be populated with work items Stories.

 Create the first story for your project. You can use the description of your choice or reuse the following example.

 In Create a Work Item field, enter: "As a user, I want be able to search for food suggestions on Twitter so that I benefit from others' experiences." Notice that you also have the option to add additional information to the work item, such as type, description, subscribers, owner, due date, tags, priority, or parent.

 Click CREATE. The work item is created. Its type is automatically set to "Story" as the tool recognizes the typical pattern used for stories (As a <type of user>, I want <some goal> so that <some reason>).

 Repeat similar steps to create four other stories (or enter the description of your choice):

o As a user, I want to see a graph with the ratings of my wish list items so that I can see which ones are the most popular over time.

o As a user, I want to store my own rating for my wish list items so that I can compare with ratings from others.

o As a user, I want to be notified when the price of a wish list item decreases so that I know when it is a good time to order.

o As a user, I want to move the wish list items to another list so I keep track of all the dishes I tasted.

 All work items are listed in the Recently Created section.

Define priorities and estimate effort

Move the most importtant stories to the top of the backlog (ranking), and define story points to represent the estimated effort to implement a story.

 Refresh your browser. The work items are no longer in the Recently Created section but in the Ranked List one.

 Move (drag) the first story that you created to the top of the backlog ("As a user, I want to be able to search for food suggestions on Twitter so that ..."). This story is now ranked as the first one.

 For this story, change the Story Points to 3 pts (click 0 pts to select another value). It gives an indication of the effort needed to implement this story (see the image below)

 Optionally, you can reorder the other items on the backlog and change their Story Points value.

Now that you have an ordered backlog, you are ready to proceed with Sprint planning.

c. Define new Sprints for the project

Now that the Product Backlog is populated, it is time to define how many Sprints you will have in your project and the duration of these Sprints. This varies according to the project objectives and the release dates.

 On the left pane, click Sprint Planning, then click the Add Sprints button.
 Configure the sprints so you have at least two, and specify a duration of two weeks per sprint.

 Click Create. The sprints are created. At any point in time, you can click Edit Sprints to reconfigure your Sprints.

 On the left pane, click the Sprint Planning link.

 Select Sprint 2 in the list box

 The backlog and Sprint 2 are displayed on the same page.

d. Assign some backlog items to the first Sprint

Select Sprint 1 (Current Sprint). The backlog and Sprint 1 are displayed side by side to facilitate planning activities.

 To assign work to the first sprint, move (drag and drop) the first story from the backlog to Sprint 1. ("As a user, I want be able to search for food suggestions on Twitter so that ...").

 Note that on an Agile project, the team might decide to decompose stories into tasks and track the work at the task level. To simplify the scenario, you do not create child tasks in this lab.

 Change the owner for this story by assigning yourself.

 Change the status of this story to Start Working.

 You are ready to implement the story. When the story is completed, you change the status again to reflect progress on the project.