Visualizing Program Increment Planning Board for SAFe
Overview
As your team grows and the complexity of projects increases, you may find yourself exploring how Jira
might be extended to support the Scaled Agile (SAFe) approach to development.
When faced with this situation, Arm worked with our partner, Adaptavist, to identify solutions. Leveraging the combined power of VisualScript and ScriptRunner, they identified the program increment planning board as something that could be moved off white boards and digitized in Jira.
The goal was to create PI planning boards automatically using data.
Read the full case study.
Generate a REST Endpoint with ScriptRunner
There are two ways to generate a visual from data using VisualScript. One involves using the JavaScript Report Builder to write scripts. Another way is to write a program outside VisualScript in whatever
language and using any hosting solution you prefer and simply expose a REST endpoint that returns markup that VisualScript can connect to.
To solve Arm's problem, Adaptavist worked on building a REST endpoint using ScriptRunner for Jira.
They constructed two custom endpoints with slightly different parameters to address two use cases: fix version and planned version.
The REST endpoint they created takes 3 URL parameters, which determine what data is visualized:
- ART - represents a team
- PI - represents a program increment event
- fixOrPlan - whether they are looking at the planned version or the fix (or actual) version
Program Increment Planning Board Gadget
They add two VisualScript gadgets to the the dashboard, one for each of the two versions of the program increment board aligned with features in SAFe.
Both versions are designed to be split by rows based on the ART/team with the information pulled from a cascading select list.
The first version shows the plan:
The second version shows the actual or "Fix" version of events:
The two boards give product owners visibility into the current state of development and compare that with what they had planned on. Visualizing program increment boards inside Jira without any whiteboard work is immensely valuable when dealing with massive interdependent projects at the enterprise scale.
Success at Scale
The method described above can be used as a PI Planning template by any organization interested in improving their Program Incremenent planning process. Contact us to see how VisualScript can help digitize your program planning increment boards.
"We have always used a physical whiteboard to visualize Sprint dependencies, features and relevant milestones during our PI Planning. VisualScript has provided us with a real-time dashboard in Jira to visualize this data. As a result, we have started to see improvement in collaboration and efficiency across globally distributed implementation teams."
Rob Negus, Director of IT Product Delivery, Delivery Management and Agile CoE, Arm IT
