Format: lecture/ experience report
Duration: 30 or 60 minutes (still open, see schedules below)

Abstract

Our unit is organized into feature teams. Feature teams are cross-functional teams that are capable of developing full features themselves.

One at a time, one of the feature teams, has the rotating responsibility of handling the maintenance. The maintenance manager is then their product owner. Teams use scrum and the sprint length is 2 weeks. When we started, the maintenance team expected a backlog of maintenance items to work on, for the next 2 weeks. However maintenance, by nature, is reactive and priorities change daily as new customer cases arrived. This caused problems. Iteratively the team started looking into how to better serve their customer (the maintenance manager) and came up with a good process. Then the team heard about Kanban and to their surprise, it looked very familiar.

More detailed description

In the autumn 2008 the F-Secure Windows Clients Engineering unit moved into its second phase of its Agile Transition and organized itself into feature teams. Feature teams are cross-functional teams that are capable of developing full features themselves.

One of the feature teams is always handling the maintenance. This is a rotating responsibility and each feature team has the maintenance duty for 3-6 months. All feature teams started off by using scrum and started using two weeks as their sprint length. The maintenance manager is the product owner for the maintenance team.

Scrum caused some headache for the maintenance manager as the team expected a backlog of items, from which they can pick 2 weeks of work to fill their sprint. Problem was the maintenance, by nature, is reactive and priorities might change daily as new urgent customer cases appear. The customer cannot wait for two weeks to get his urgent problems solved. Henrik Kniberg describes a similar problem in one of his blog entries: http://blog.crisp.se/henrikkniberg/2009/04/03/1238795520000.html

This nearly turned into a conflict as the team, following Scrum, did not want to accept any changes in the requirements during the sprint. The maintenance manager again fought hard to serve his customers in a timely manner. After 3 months the maintenance team changed and the new maintenance team looked more into how they better can serve the maintenance manager, who after all is their customer (product owner). They started off by giving the maintenance manager an allocation of unplanned work that he can use as he wanted. Time went by and that allocation grew and the maintenance manager liked the idea. At one point the system was changed so that the maintenance manager can freely use the whole team allocation as he wanted, but with the limitation that the team can only work on a certain amounts of items at a time. This is what is used now.

The team then heard about Kanban and read Henrik's blog. They were quite surprised to see that Kanban looked very much like their current system. They had come up with Kanban without knowing about it.

Schedule (30 min):
5 min - Describing F-Secure
5 min - Describing the feature team model and scrum
5 min - Describing co-operation with the first team - Stick with Scrum rules
5 min - Describing co-operation with the second team - How to serve the
customer
5 min - Describing Kanban
5 min - Closing and discussions

Schedule (60 min):
5 min - Describing F-Secure
10 min - Describing the feature team model and scrum
5 min - Describing co-operation with the first team - Stick with Scrum rules
10 min - Describing co-operation with the second team - How to serve the
customer
10 min - Describing Kanban and differences between Scrum & Kanban
10 min - Other learning
10 min - Closing and discussions

Bios

Jan Sandbacka has been working in the Software industry for over 15 years. He started working for Datafellows in 1999, which then became F-Secure later the same year. Jan has been working as a software engineer, system's integrator, development manager, project manager, team manager and scrum master. Now he is 'Manager: Lean Practices' and works both as a team manager and scrum master. In 2001 Jan read an article about the Agile manifesto and got interested in Agile software development. After having practicing Agile development for a while he read the book 'The Toyota Way' and also got interested into the Lean concepts. Now Jan is applying both Lean and Agile values in his daily work and he thinks they are a good combination.

Harri Susi (not confirmed yet)

Oleg Fedorov (not confirmed yet)