Do you have the numbers? Empowering the delivery team and business stakeholders.
Around one month ago, Sven and I were discussing about our next project… we have been always playing with this idea of starting a new company… you know…
freedom + happiness = success
Well I don’t know if this is the exact equation… but I always like these quotes that surf around the Internet:
“ doing what you like is freedom, liking what you do is happiness”.
Anyway… he showed me the following video:
Since then, we have been thinking how to connect this with our day-to-day life and some ideas came up…
The idea of closing the loop is what I loved most: from one job to the next one. Everything is integrated in an easy and smooth way: notifications, wearable displays, augmented reality… everything is served when is needed.
The project: from one user story to the next one
I recurrently hear the developers asking whether we have numbers about the use of the functionalities they are delivering. Sometimes they received some numbers… but far away from what I would call: closing the loop.
I envision big realtime dashboards providing information about the use of every functionality that developers deliver. Visualisations that link business value, complexity (or story points) and real-time (or aggregated) use.
The visualisations must be something easy to grasp, easy to understand but above all motivational.
A very simple example is the following about motivational. Big dashboards come later… ;) Start small… go big!
A developer wakes up first thing in the morning and sees in her/his wristband a green colour and a message. The message could say something like:
“Remember last user story we released together at the top of the backlog? Cool! It was used by 1000 users yesterday! Ready to beat the challenge in the current sprint? You deliver the value. We build the future together. Let’s do it!”
How would I do it?
Design is Dead, as many companies, use JIRA. JIRA exposes most of the functionality with a rather simple API. This API enables most of the functionality that JIRA has such as the issue creation and retrieving dashboard information.
From there, we can gather all the information regarding a user story, including the complexity. The identifier will be used in the web tracker to link the business value and complexity with the real use of the application.
Google Analytics is a wonderful tool to track the use of your app with a rather powerful API for web tracking, but also for reporting (specially the realtime API that you get the data within seconds).
During the configuration of Google Analytics, we would need to set up the identifier of the user story… I guess that GA supports it… A quick look into the API suggests that we could use the data Source or the Link Parameter fields (maybe such suggestion hurts the eyes of a GA expert… ;)).
But the idea behind is that a developer can easily setup the link between tracking and the user story in GA.
Then, this information can easily be used and displayed, for example, in ambient displays… big TVs or wall screens along the office corridors, all around… the goal is to raise awareness about:
“what we are building and delivering together…”
Would I stop there?
Never! I am a data freak. Moreover, I love that people can reflect on their own work and their impact on others’ lives!
We use Cucumber to write our functional tests. We also use Selenium to build web browser automated tests.
These frameworks enable non-technical people to understand the functional flow (in addition to the technical benefits that I will not describe in this post). Cucumber and Selenium enable to write test scenarios in plain English and performing tests automatically on the web browser. Therefore, the person who executes the tests can visually follow the functional flow.
Ok… we connected JIRA and Google Analytics before. Now, we could add the functional tests in Selenium.
The goal would be that the user of our big dashboard sees the user story description, the business value, the complexity and the use of such functionality. In addition, s/he could click on a button and the functional tests are executed automatically, so the user is driven through all the functional flows.
Shall we stop there?
Maybe not… we could get further linking SVN or Git commits, RescueTime information, agendas with Google Calendar API or Outlook Calendar API.
Maybe we should go crazy and start tracking environmental metrics… nowadays is relatively easy to deploy Internet of Things platforms such as VersaSense.
The goal is: tracking and aggregating data to close the loop.
Yes, I dream of a better agile place, where the delivery teams get immersed in the business flows and business departments understand the delivered technical value better.
“Let’s travel together the agile journey”
Eh! Wait… I haven’t finished yet…
Remember about the big screens? Here you can see a bit of Sven’s and my work in the field of Analytics and visualisations across multiple devices…
These works are the outcome of long conversations and technical implementations with Sven at the creative side (front-end — you can check his work in his portfolio) and I at the back-end / data collection and processing side…
Feedback is rather welcome! You will find me on about.me, Twitter and, for sure, LinkedIn.
