Driven by priority - practical tips

Agile processes are designed to support changing activities when the business environment changes. This after all is the natural understanding of the word agile - the ability to change direction quickly. What this means in practice is the tasks in plans - backlog items in a release say - have to be prioritised and changed when priorities change. This has always been a feature of xProcess, but in the very earliest releases the priorities list was a single list. We soon found when we had up to 1000 stories, features requests and defects to prioritise against each other it was an almost impossible task to get your brain round it all. This led to the current model in the product where groups of tasks can be defined and prioritised relative to one another, and then the groups themselves can be given a "weight" relative to other groups so that the overall priority list can be derived. This allowed us for example to prioritize bugs relative to one another and then decide on the balance between bug-fixing and new features in any given release. It made the whole process much more manageable.

The screen shot below shows a single "Priority Group" being prioritised, either by dragging and dropping tasks or by giving them a priority number.

Recently a user of the xProcess "Basic Scrum" process raised the issue that the relative priorities of user stories get lost if stories are moved from one Sprint to another (for example if they are incomplete at the end of the Sprint). Here's my reply:

xProcess has a very flexible mechanism for defining priorities using "Priority Groups" which allows any Folder or Parent Task which has been "prioritised" to support ordering of tasks within it. Each Priority Group can be given a "weight" so that all the priorities can be combined into the ordered list that the scheduler uses. As with many of the very flexible mechanisms in the product, when you actually tailor the product for a given process (Basic Scrum in this case), you have to make some decisions about the normal way to use the features.

Basic Scrum defines Sprints as prioritised Parent Tasks with diminishing weight (later Sprints therefore have lower weight and are scheduled after the earlier ones). As you've observed when you move a task from one Sprint to the next the priorities they had in the previous Sprint gets lost. So if this is a normal part of your process - I can understand why it could be - why not define another prioritised group (say a Folder called Release Backlog) where you can give your stories a longer lasting relative priority. The weight for this group does not need to be high because it will just be the "tie-breaker" when stories have the same priority in Sprint. I think this should achieve what your aiming for.

There are many different way to use Priority Groups, some of which have been incorporated into the standard processes released with xProcess. For example the Simple Process has the facility to add "High", "Medium" and "Low" categories to the project so that just by categorising tasks they get prioritised appropriately.

What's different about Folders?

When you're deciding on the structure of project patterns for a new process, often the first thing to consider is how to represent the different hierarchies of elements that make up projects.

In FDD for example there is the hierarchy of features, normally described as being Features, which are contained in Feature Sets, which are contained in Business Areas or Major Feature Sets. This logical grouping of functionality is independent of priority and time-ordering. It may well correspond to the structure of the user manual for example or the Functional Specification should such a document be required. It doesn't give us any time view. On the other hand the hierarchy from Releases -> containing Timeboxes -> containing Features is a time-based structure. Similarly the hierarchy based on the five subprocesses of FDD also will have a time correspondence: The Definition Stage -> containing FDD#1 Develop Overall Model, FDD#2 Build Feature List, and FDD#3 Plan by Feature; The Build Stage -> containing many instances (for each feature) of FDD#4 Design by Feature and FDD#5 Build by Feature; and the Release/Deployment Stage following completion of a release.

Each of these hierachies is an important view of the tasks and artifacts in the project. However when defining a process in xProcess you must decide which hierarchy will define where a task "lives". This is the parent-child hierarchy of tasks and is analogous to a directory structure which tells you where a file is located. All the other relevant hierachies can be represented with Folders which contain explicit or implicit (defined by rule) references to the tasks. This means that different features may appear in different Timeboxes and Releases, and indeed different subtasks of a feature may appear in different folders (design and build for example may appear in different timeboxes; build and certify a feature may appear in different stages). Since Folders may contain Folders in xProcess as many hierarchies can be provided as are required to understand the process, each to several containment layers if this helps understand the view.

So Folders provide an alternative hierarchy of tasks to the main parent-child structure. Their membership is defined either explicitly (because the process has put them there or the user has dragged them into the Folder) or implicitly (because the task has a matching category to the category of the Folder). In some methods it is sensible to use the parent-child hierarchy for time-based structure (Basic Scrum 3.0.1 follows this scheme for example). In others using a more static structure such as Business Areas/Feature Sets in FDD or a Work Breakdown Structure in traditional methods, gives the preferred structure for parents-children with more dynamic hierachies being represented with Folders.

Folders are changing

There's a new spec for Folders in xProcess that should be released shortly in the v3 programme. The new feature let's you define a hierarchy of Folders and it clarifies the difference between folders with "explicit" members (the tasks are in the folder because someone put them there) and "implicit" members (the tasks are there because they fulfil the criteria for the folder - usually that they are in the appropriate category.

Email me or post a comment below if you would like a preview of this spec.