Forming Agile Scrum Teams to Manage DITA Infrastructure

Forming Agile/Scrum Teams� to Manage DITA Infras�tructure

July 20161

Stan Doherty ([email protected])

Deborah Femia ([email protected])

Timothy O'Keefe ([email protected])

https://ideas.infomanagementcenter.com/summeragenda-day-2/simplivity-2/

mailto:[email protected]



Agile Scrum to Manage DITA InfrastructureAGENDA

Background: SimpliVity Corporation (Stan)

Rationale: why choose to manage DITA infrastructure with Scrum?

Logis�tics�: how we set up the Scrum team (Tim)

DITA: what infrastructure goals did we tackle (Deborah)

Take-aways�: what did I learn about doing scrummy DITA? (Stan)

Take-aways�: what worked? what will we improve? (Tim)

Take-aways�: what aspects of DITA infrastructure worked well in Scrum? (Deborah)

Wrap-up: Measure, adapt, iterate (Stan)

Agile Scrum to Manage DITA InfrastructureImportant Dis�claimer

THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS PRESENTATION IS PROVIDED FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY.

WHILE EFFORTS WERE MADE TO VERIFY THE COMPLETENESS AND ACCURACY OF THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS PRESENTATION, IT IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.

IN ADDITION, THIS INFORMATION IS BASED ON SIMPLIVITY’S CURRENT PRODUCT PLANS AND STRATEGY, WHICH ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE BY SIMPLIVITY WITHOUT NOTICE. SIMPLIVITY SHALL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF, OR OTHERWISE RELATED TO, THIS PRESENTATION OR ANY OTHER DOCUMENTATION.

NOTHING CONTAINED IN THIS PRESENTATION IS INTENDED TO, OR SHALL HAVE THE EFFECT OF: • CREATING ANY WARRANTY OR REPRESENTATION FROM SIMPLIVITY; OR • ALTERING THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THE APPLICABLE LICENSE AGREEMENT GOVERNING THE USE OF SIMPLIVITY SOFTWARE.

Agile Scrum to Manage DITA Infrastructure

BACKGROUND: SimpliVity Corporation (http://www.s�implivity.com)

SimpliVity Hyperconvergence delivers enterprise performance, protection, and resiliency, with greater economics and cost savings than public cloud.

1. HyperEfficient: 90% capacity savings across storage and backup combined.2. HyperProtected: 60-seconds or less on average for local backup or restore of a 1 TB VM.3. HyperSimple: 3 clicks to back up, restore, clone, or move a VM from a single console.4. HyperManageable: 60-seconds or less on average to create or update backup policies for 1000s of VMs across dozens of remote sites from a single console.5. HyperAvailable: Add or remove a local or remote SimpliVity system without downtime, without interruption to local or remote backups, and without reconfiguration of backup policies or IP addresses.

Agile Scrum to Manage DITA InfrastructureRATIONALE: Why choos�e to manage DITA infras�tructure us�ing a Scrum team?


RATIONALE: Why choos�e to manage DITA infras�tructure us�ing a Scrum team?

The benefits can vary per your Engineering organizationand where it is in its Agile/Scrum adoption.


SCRUM TRADITIONALLegend:



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1. Increased visibility and accountability to DITA stakeholders.2. Excellent metrics on where you are spending time.3. Increased flexibility in shifting priorities.


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Agile Scrum to Manage DITA InfrastructureRATIONALE: Why choose to manage DITA infrastructure using a Scrum team?



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4. Increased integration with general Scrum culture in Engineering. Function as a peer team.


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5. Preserve what you can of the infrastructure or standards in place.


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5. Preserve what you can of the infrastructure or standards in place.


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COMMUNITIESOF PRACTICE

Agile Scrum to Manage DITA InfrastructureLOGISTICS: How we set up the Scrum team?

What the heck is Agile Scrum anyway? •Agile is a way of thinking about work.•Scrum is a framework for developing complex products.

• Scrum was created by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber.• Think of Agile as how to cook and Scrum as a particular recipe.

•Empowers teams to self-organize and determine how to complete work.•Scrum draws from Lean Manufacturing + customer feedback.•Encourages transparency, reflective behavior, and incremental changes

that enable teams to work more effectively.•Scrum is most common implementation (Kanban, Lean Startup).•http://www.scrumguides.org/

Typical Scrum Teams• Scrum Master, Product Owner, and 5-8 team members.• Self-organized and empowered to make decisions.• Participate in daily standups.• Work from a backlog.• Implement, inspect and adapt their work.

http://www.scrumguides.org/


LOGISTICS: How we set up the Scrum team?

Downers and Challenges•All writers assigned to at least one scrum team.

• Fractional assignments and lack of resources for INFRA projects.

Uppers and Excitement•Writers were already working on INFRA projects, but this was invisible.

• Scrum helped bring clarity and measure to these efforts.

Things that helped get us there•Company investment and commitment to scrum.

• Team members & managers willing to adopt these ways of working.• Hired experienced Scrum Masters & trained new ones.

•External training and guest speakers.•Onsite scrum coach and internal training.•Scrum of scrums.•Organizations: Agile New England and Agile Boston.


LOGISTICS: How we set up the Scrum team?

What does a Doc Infrastructure team do? •It does not create end user content.•Infrastructure stories: integrating CCMS with Support, tooling changes, etc.•Editorial, authoring, and production standards.•Information Architecture standards: context help source markup.•Collaboration resources: templates, wiki pages, and training.

Staffing Assignments•Created core INFRA team from within the existing doc department.•Core team members allocate 50% of their time to INFRA tasks and stories.•Extended team members float, and assist as they can throughout the sprint.

• Swarming is important.

What does a doc infra scrum master do?• Schedules and facilitates meetings• Standup, planning, retrospective• Created email list and Jira board• Socialize the team’s role to the rest of the organization


DITA: What infrastructure goals did we tackle?

Agile Scrum to Manage DITA InfrastructureDITA: What infrastructure goals did we tackle?

Incremental transform improvements•Based on an excellent foundation of a plugin created before moving to scrum•Small, encapsulated changes to PDF and WebHelp styling•Roll outs of new and upgraded tools

Agile Scrum to Manage DITA InfrastructureDITA: What infrastructure goals did we tackle?


Publishing pipeline improvements•Significant changes to automated builds•Broken down into manageable tasks in sequence





Release-related tasks•End of release clean-up, verification, publishing, branching tasks





Release-related tasks•End of release clean-up, verification, publishing, branching tasks

Information Engineering team standards creation•Authoring spec•Context-sensitive Help standards / ID management system•Style standards


TAKE-AWAYS: What did I learn about doing scrummy DITA?

Don't cheat: Follow Scrum principles as faithfully as possible: > Ceremonies -- grooming, planning, standups, reviews, retros > Backlog management and metrics > Team member commitment




Minimize role confusion: Transition … > Traditional roles (Manager, Information Architect, Team Lead, IC) . . . to . . . > Scrum roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Team member).





Focus on crisp team charters: Build Scrum teams around specific goals: > Infrastructure/standards > Content development (typically integrated with feature development scrum teams) > Sustaining > Release management (Release Notes, KB articles, Sustaining)





Focus on crisp team charters: Build Scrum teams around specific goals: > Infrastructure/standards > Content development (typically integrated with feature development scrum teams) > Sustaining > Release management (Release Notes, KB articles, Sustaining)

Inspect and adapt: Always a work in progress; learn from failures; persist.


LOGISTICS: What worked? What will we improve?

Things that worked well•Creating the Doc Infrastructure team worked well.•Swarming.•Enabling people to opt-in.•Pipeline for engineers to draft content.•Overcome problem of having more work to do than dedicated people.•Bringing visibility to all of the work the doc group does.•Creating stories when gaps are identified.

Things that required incremental improvement •Initially tried to have a story captain for every story.•Bringing clarity to the definition of the team.

• Where do impediments get resolved?•Velocity is not stable because of fluctuating team size.•Struggle to identify time allocation for this team.


DITA: What aspects of the DITA infrastructure worked well here?

Agile Scrum to Manage DITA InfrastructureDITA: What aspects of the DITA infrastructure worked well here?

Manageable, sequenced, prioritized tasks•Help to organize way of working




Visible / transparency•Infra. tasks previously carried out behind the scenes•Helps to quantify time/effort needed for Infra. tasks vs. other tasks





Story comments in JIRA serve as a logical means for…•Team discussion•Easy-to-find reporting of conclusions





Story comments in JIRA serve as a logical means for…•Team discussion•Easy-to-find reporting of conclusions

It’s nice to see all that your team has accomplished!


WRAP-UP: Measure, adapt, iterate

Forming Agile Scrum Teams to Manage DITA Infrastructure

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