First release planning event

The corner of a program board. Every team has its own
row, and columns are for sprints. The post-it notes show
the features that the team is working on, while red
strings indicate dependencies.

The trains have left the station! Our two release trains arranged their first release planning event this week. It was a major event, arranged simultaneously in two countries, where teams from most of our functions (R&D, Customer Services, Q&R, Marketing etc.) planned their program increment together. It could have become a gigantic mess, but fortunately we had experienced coaches helping us, so the event went pretty well.

Some lessons learned:

• It may not be easy to involve all functions in your agile transformation, but at least in our case the usefulness of the plan would have been questionable if it had been limited to R&D.
• Try to get everyone to the same location, or do your best to help the remote teams stay on track with the planning. I am still looking for the best tools for remote participation; any suggestions?
• Your first program board is a great eye-opener. If your plan is too complex and fragile with many dependencies between the teams, the board will look like the web of a caffeinated spider.
• Two coaches and one full-time facilitator besides the release train engineer is not overkill for your first event.
• A standard-length release planning event (1½–2 days) can get exhausting for the participants. You can shorten it if all teams create their draft plans in advance; the event can then focus on dependencies, risks and required changes.

Big but agile

Wow, they have rules for everything! That was my culture shock back in 2001 when I first saw a quality system after joining a medical device development company.

Twelve years later, my first proper encounter with the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) was at Scan Agile 2013, where many an agilist in the audience was huffing and puffing and mumbling objections during Dean Leffingwell’s presentation.

If you come from a small but growing software development company, I can well understand how SAFe feels like an un-agile and overly complex framework – and it may well not be the best recipe for your situation. But for those of us who work in large systems development companies with traditional project management practices in a regulated field, SAFe provides a practical map for starting your agile journey – just make sure that you don’t stop moving.

In our business unit, we started using Scrum in our software development teams four years ago. It soon became evident that we wouldn’t reap all the benefits of agile development if we didn’t try to change the surrounding organization and the way we selected and prioritized our goals. This year, we decided to try out SAFe. It has been a busy spring and summer for us: getting trained, forming new teams, setting up our tools, collecting backlogs... but also discussing our values and management styles. Our first release planning event will start tomorrow.

Autopsy of Windows 10 File History

I upgraded our family PC from Windows 7 to Windows 10 yesterday. My first impression is generally positive: our trusty old machine feels faster, and the operating system has many small improvements.

However, today I had a closer look at the File History feature inherited from Windows 8 and had to ask myself: Was this feature created by a trainee? Were the design and code reviewed and tested?

1. Files are copied to an external drive without any compression. Well, my drive is still large enough.
2. If the computer has multiple users who have shared folders in their libraries, the contents of the shared folders are copied to everyone’s personal backup copy. Buy a big drive! You can of course fix this by excluding the shared folders in each user’s settings, except that...
3. In my initial experiments, the modified settings disappeared.
4. Last but not least, all users of the computer have access to each other’s backup files. This could have been fixed by setting the permissions of the FileHistory folder, as Paul Coddington pointed out in 2013.

Is the File History feature intended to be just a toy?