Coordinating releases across teams just got easier
Tempo Team
Originally published March 26, 2019
Starting with version 5.3 of Structure PPM, you can now group by version names across teams.
This feature is especially useful for organizations where multiple teams work towards the same versions, like an Agile Release Train.
You may already be familiar with our existing fixVersion Grouper, which allows you to group issues by their version, but creates separate groups for each project. The new Version Name Grouper goes several steps further, allowing you to group by a variety of version fields (including custom version fields) and keeping items with the same version name together, even if they are from different projects.
Like our other Automation features, you can include the Version Name Grouper with other generators, including other Group generators, to build highly-customized structures, providing exactly the information your teams need. Below are some examples where we can see how the new Version Name Grouper can help large organizations scale their agile processes.
Tracking PI
It is a common SAFe practice to release a new integrated version each PI (Program Increment), so we’ve created a custom version field, PI, to track the progress of our upcoming releases. Using the Version Name Grouper, we’ve organized issue by their PI – so we can easily see the progress of stories for each version, across all our projects.
Visualizing Sprint Progress Across Teams Towards a fixVersion
In an Agile environment, you likely have multiple teams working on their own sprints toward a single release version. Below, we’ve grouped all of our issues by their respective sprints and then grouped those sprints by their fixVersion name. This allows you to easily track the progress of each fixVersion, across teams, and then dig deeper to look at the progress of each team’s sprint, to track their contribution to the release.
Seeing Cross-team Dependencies
If you’re using the Gantt Charts for Structure add-on, with the Version Name Grouper you can take an even closer look at how cross-team efforts are impacting your version goals. By adding a Gantt chart to the example above, you can see where teams are blocked by items that are another team’s responsibility. This can help with sprint planning and prioritization.
The Version Name Grouper effectively allows managers to track multiple teams working towards a common goal when that goal is defined in a specific version field. Synchronizing the visualization across fixVersions, PIs or other Version fields allows for easy cross-team planning and communication. This consolidated information also gives the manager the ability to act across multiple teams without needing multiple windows, since they still have access to Structure’s in-place editing functionality.
To learn more about this release, visit the Atlassian Marketplace. You can view our release notes and begin a free 30-day trial.
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