This document discusses using JIRA and GreenHopper to manage multiple Scrum teams working on a large product divided into subsystems. It proposes mapping business concepts like products, teams, subsystems to JIRA/GreenHopper entities like projects, components, and custom fields. This would allow tracking progress across sprints, releases and teams through version hierarchies and aggregated reporting while maintaining flexibility.

1. Scrum of Scrums
Bringing JIRA & GreenHopper
to entire company
Wojciech Seliga
wojciech.seliga@spartez.com

2. Scenario
● One major product with multiple Scrum teams
working on it (Scrum of Scrums)
● Product split into several subsystems
● Global product backlog
● Team product backlogs
● Monthly sprints (parallel...)
● Internal releases every N sprints
● Public releases every M internal releases
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3. Release Cycle
Marketing Release
Marketing Release
Internal Release
Internal Release Internal Release
Internal Release Internal Release
Internal Release
Sprint
Sprint Sprint
Sprint Sprint
Sprint Sprint
Sprint Sprint
Sprint Sprint
Sprint Sprint
Sprint
Team A
Team A
Team B
Team B
...
Team N
Team N
Time
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4. Requirements
● Current Sprint Progress Tracking
● Current Internal Release Progress Tracking
● Current Marketing Release Progress Tracking
● Measuring Progress in Story Points (“done”/all)
● Trends
Per Scrum Team
Per Scrum Team Per Subsystem
Per Subsystem Globally
Globally
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5. GH take on Scrum of Scrums
GreenHopper allows you to nest child versions to provide flexibility in
Scrum project management. For example, you might want to group all
issues that need addressing in a major product version at the highest
level of a version hierarchy. Since you might have separate teams, each
working on different components that constitute this major product
version, you may wish to represent each of those components as an
immediate child ('component') version of the major product version. From
here, you may wish to break up a given component into sprints,
depending on the amount of work required to develop it. Therefore, each
of these sprints would be an immediate child ('sprint') version of its
respective 'component version'.
GH online documentation
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6. Problems
● Combinatorial explosion of Versions x Teams
● Inability to aggregate easily results
● Inability slice and dice backlogs (per team, per
component/subsystem)
● Many reports base on issue count or hours
● Trends need more love
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7. Solution
Business Domain → JIRA/GH Entity
Product Project
Team Component
Subsystem Multi-Select Custom Field
Product Backlog GH Project Backlog
Team Backlog Component Backlog
Marketing Release Top-Level Version
Internal Release Mid-Level Version
Sprint Bottom-Level Version
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8. Product Backlog
Product Backlog Team B Product Backlog Subsystem P Backlog
Story 1
Story 1 Story 1
Story 1 Story 2
Story 2
Story 2
Story 2 Story 4
Story 4 Story 3
Story 3
Story 3
Story 3 Story 5
Story 5 Story 5
Story 5
Story 4
Story 4 Story 9
Story 9 Story 6
Story 6
Story 5
Story 5 Story 7
Story 7
Story 6
Story 6 Story 8
Story 8
Story 7
Story 7 GH Component Board Story 10
Story 10
Story 8
Story 8
Story 9
Story 9
Story 10
Story 10 GH Contexts
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9. Backlog Management
Live Demo
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10. Progress & Trend Tracking
● Sprint burndowns (hours, stories)
● Internal release burndowns (stories)
● Public release burndowns (stories)
● Scheduled vs. unscheduled stories
● Committed stories vs. stretch goals
● Team Velocity Trends
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11. Progress & Trends Tracking
Live Demo
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12. Forgotten “Small” Thing
“Hey, our parallel sprints are not so parallel...”
“Gosh, we need to modify GreenHopper itself”
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13. World is not perfect
● Stories fixed in several releases
● Unfinished work
● Hierarchical versions are awesome, but ... JIRA
does not know about them
● Sometimes GH behaviour is not what we
expect
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14. Future
● Rapid Board
● Pluggable date strategies in GreenHopper
● Executive Dashboard / Project Portfolio
Management
● Automatic Velocity calculations
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15. Summary
● GreenHopper is amazingly flexible
● Think out of the box (or: the mapping is tricky)
● Try to satisfy your needs by existing
functionality, write plugins if you really cannot
● Dashboards and gadgets FTW
● JIRA + GH works in Scrum of Scrums
environment pretty well
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16. Credits
● Huge thanks to Lumesse Limited for allowing
me to talk about it publicly and use their prod
data
● Many thanks to Mariusz Chrapko for his
creativity, great Scrum attitude and passion
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