Agile planning with Rational Team Concert (RTC) workshop provides tip for agile team to successfully use RTC to support for the three innermost levels of Mike Cohn's planning onion: product, release and sprint / iteration planning. RTC also provides extensive support source code management and integration to CI build and automated release deployment tools such as UrbanCode Deploy For more information see https://jazz.net/library/article/593 Details Rational Team Concert (RTC) provides a lightweight tool to help project teams plan, executing and monitor agile, waterfall and scaled agile development projects (such as Scrum, Scrum of Scrums, Disciplined Agile Delivery - DAD, or Scaled Agile Framework - SAFe. For agile projects / programs, RTC provides tools to create product, release and sprint backlogs for teams, to create individual plans for developers, and to track the progress during an iteration and to balance the work load of developers. For waterfall projects / programs, RTC provides development teams with traditional project management capabilities such as work breakdown structures, schedule dependencies, constraints and Gantt charts.

1. Agile Planning with
Rational Team Concert (RTC)
Reedy Feggins Jr
Agile Coach / CSM / WW Solution Architect
rfeggins@us.ibm.com
September 1, 2013

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Webinar Overview
Agile planning is one of the key strengths of RTC
From planning a simple iteration, to a release for one team, or a whole
project with multiple iterations and teams - RTC Agile Planning comes
with a set of ready-to-use plan types and plan views
In this webinar, see how to get started with RTC Agile Planning, as well
as tailoring plans to suit your needs

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Agile Planning Onion*
• Strategy – defines the vision associated with a business need or direction.
• Portfolio – defines the overall product offering that consists of applications and tools and
how they integrate.
• Product – defines a product vision and
outlines the road-map for the product.
Strategy
Portfolio
Product
Release
Iteration
Day
(*) Mike Cohn, Agile Estimating and Planning

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Agile Planning Onion*
Product – defines a product vision
and outlines the road-map for
the product.
Release – represents a prioritized
backlog of product features that
are committed to be delivered ina
given time period.
Sprint / Iteration – defines short,
fixed-length subsets of releases,
typically 2-4 week time frame.
Day – represents the actions taken
in a day to achieve the iteration
goals.
Strategy
Portfolio
Product
Release
Iteration
Day
(*) Mike Cohn, Agile Estimating and Planning
Agile team plans at the
innermost three levels.
RTC offers support for all
these levels

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Planning Onion Layers: Development Project
Agile team plans at the innermost three levels.
RTC offers support for all these levels
Strategy
Portfolio
Product
Release
Iteration
Day

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Rational Team Concert (RTC) Plan Definition

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Rational Team Concert (RTC) Plan Definition
• Unified view of Information
– What - Work Items
– Who – Project Area / Team Area
– When – Iteration
• Plans are owned by a team or project and
are associated with an iteration
• Plan content is derived from
All work items which have a Filed Against
value set to a category owned by the Plan’s
team or project and are planned for plan’s
iteration.
• Plans have a plan type, which define the layer
in the planning “onion”.

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TIP: Named Iterations vs Calendar-based Iterations
Use calendar-based iterations when
individual teams have their own sprint
schedules that differ from other teams
Lowest common denominator is the
calendar
All teams need to reach the same end
point but get there at their own pace
Use named iterations when all teams are
sync’d to the same schedule
NOTE:
•Iterations are displayed and sorted by name
•Iterations with the same names will not be
easily differentiated during selection
•TRICK: Use a naming convention that makes
selection easy!

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Rational Team Concert (RTC) Planning Support
Process neutral
– Out of box templates (works with Scrum, OpenUp, Formal Project Management)
– Customized templates
No separation between planning/implementing of features and bug fixing
– Both planning and defect management share a common data model
– They are supported in the same tool and are highly integrated
– Plans are in fact a query for work items
Supports:
– Top down planning (project manager, product owner, team leads, …) AND
– Bottom Up (team members) AND
– Plan consolidation (Sprint planning meetings, stand-ups, …)

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What is a backlog?
The product backlog is an ordered list of "requirements"
that is maintained for a product.
The release backlog is an ordered list of "requirements"
that is planned for the next release.
The sprint backlog is the list of work the Development
Team must address during the next sprint.
– The stories/features are broken down into tasks by the
Development Team
– Tasks on the sprint backlog are never assigned; rather, tasks are
signed up for by the team members
Product ‘Backlog’ iteration
(no dates)
Sprint ‘Backlog’ iteration
Release ‘Backlog’ iteration
TIP: Until a work item is
actively being worked on it is
really on ‘the backlog’ at some
planning level

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Planning Onion Layer: Product Backlog
• Prioritized feature list
• Plan Views
• Ranked List
• Work Breakdown
• Work Item Types
• Plan items: Work items that are relevant for
planning. Ex: Epics, Stories, etc.
Product
Release
Iteration
Day
• Reports
• How your product backlog is evolving?
• How many items are there on the product
backlog?
• Can we find out how long it would take to
complete the product backlog?
• Top down Planning

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Managing a Product Backlog
• High-level plan that contains stories not planned for any release or iteration yet
• Targeted for the iteration marked as Backlog Iteration
• Prioritized feature list based on risk,
business value, etc.
• Plan items – include only non execution
items such as Epics and Stories
• Customize with themes,
business value, etc
• Define the Done Criteria

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Managing a Product Backlog
• Sizing in Story points - rough estimates based on complexity and development
effort
• Ranking - ensure that the most valuable functionality is delivered first
TIP: Plans are an actionable interface. Drag and Drop, in-context
editing and new work item creation are supported

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Planning Onion Layer: Release Backlog
• Planned/Committed features for the release of the product
• Plan Views
• Iterations
• Ranked List
• Roadmap
• Teams
• Traceability (optional)
• Work Breakdown
• Work Item Types
• Plan items: Work items that are relevant for the
planning. Ex: Themes, Epics and Stories
• Reports
• Team Velocity
All the story points that were 'achieved' grouped by the iteration they were targeted for.
• Release Burndown
Amount of outstanding work for the release, broken down by iteration.
• Top down Planning
Product
Release
Iteration
Day

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Managing a Release Backlog
• Connects the business value and the execution items.
• Iterations view: holistic view of which stories are planned for which iteration.
• Drag and drop: assign the stories to specific iterations.
• Progress/Load bars: avoid overloading an iteration considering the team's velocity and to
track overall progress.
• Coarse grained: Estimation in size; estimated in relative values such as Story Points, lines
of code, function points, etc.

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Managing a Release Backlog …
• Single view for all sprints in the release

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• Overview for multiple teams
Managing Release Backlog …

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Track progress
• Team velocity: measures a team rate of progress.
• Completing 2 Stories of 5 story points in one iteration gives a velocity of 10
• Good guess is to assume the same velocity for the next iteration

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Planning Onion Layer: Sprint Backlog
• Tasks planned for the iteration
• Plan Views
• Planned Time
• RankedList
• Roadmap
• Taskboard / Kanban
• Workbreakdown
• Work Item Types
• Execution items: Work items which have work assigned.
Ex: Task and Defect.
• Reports
• Sprint Burndown
Estimated hours required to complete remaining
work items.
Product
Release
Iteration
Day

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Planning a Sprint
• Focus on Execution: large stories broken down into smaller sub-stories and
execution items
• Fine grained: Estimation of effort: typically estimated in Ideal Hours/Days
• Custom view: Does the execution task rank relate to the business value expressed
on the product backlog?

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Planning a Sprint …
• Roadmap view: illustrates the schedule of the execution items (e.g. defects and
tasks) and the rolled-up schedule of the plan items (e.g. stories and epics).

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Planning a Sprint …
• Taskboard view:
• shows plan items in the left column and execution items in the state group columns.
• visualize the progress of the stories and their children.
• ability to adjust the state quickly with drag and drop from this view.
• color tags can be used to show the state of the plan items.

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Planning a Sprint …
• Kanban
• Define limits (counts or complexity or estimates).
• Deviations from the ideal are shown as a small box in the column header. The further you are from your
ideal, the more red the box gets.
• Shows where capacity is available as well as when capacity limits might be exceeded

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Planning a Sprint …
• Load Bars : capacity planning
• Do I have enough time to finish all my work in this iteration?
• Progress Bars : track progress
• Considering all my work for this iteration. Where am I now?
Aids in assessment of the health of the Plan

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Planning a Sprint …
Quality of Planning:
• The more work items you estimate the more precise the work can be computed.
• The quality is excellent if all work items are estimated, it is good if the majority is
estimated, ...
• Visually, the percentage of estimated work items is represented as a fill-level.
• The height of load and progress bars shows how many work items have an estimate.
• If no work item is estimated, the bar is not visible, if all work items are estimated, the
bar is fully visible.

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TIP: Plans Are Fancy Queries & Queries Answer Questions
Primary query/filter parameters are:
– Owner (i.e. Team)
– Iteration
– Plan item types or all items (Plan & Execution)
Additional parameters for filtering,
grouping and display can be defined in a
Plan View
– Setup views to help answer specific questions
or to draw attention to anomolies
Example:
Verification
View

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TRICK: Work Item Exclusion vs Inclusion in Plan Views
Plan default is to EXCLUDE work items
based on selected parameters
Behavior is to show only current and
future work, which burns down over time
Show work items
that include
this string
Exclude work
items meeting
this criteria
How many
work items are
not shown
Expression Syntax:
type:Defect [Excludes]
!type:Defect [Includes]

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TIP: Performance recommendations
Large plans unmanageable
Build simpler view modes (outsource other plan view modes into separate plans and link
them together so that navigation is easier)

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Planning Onion Layer in Rational Team Concert: Day
• My Work View: Developers plan their assigned work and adjust estimates
• Managing new work
• Managing current work
• Managing future work
• Work Load
• Find, filter, and colorize planned work items
• Daily Stand ups: Developer Taskboard view to see what people are working on.
• Planned Time: Developers sort the work items in the order in which they intends to work on
them
• Bottom Up Planning
Product
Release
Iteration
Day

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How does an individual developer work during a sprint?
• My work view: in place estimation, feeds, …
• Planned time view: Developers sort the work items in
the order in which they intend to work on them in my work
view.
• Warnings/errors are shown if the work is lagging behind
the schedule
• My work view approximation in the web: Customized
Planned Time View show a specific owner.

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How does an individual developer work during a sprint? …
• One place to view queries that
impact my work

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Additional Information
Effective Planning with Rational Team Concert 4.0
–https://jazz.net/library/article/594
Cross-Project Tracking with Rational Team Concert, Version 4.0
–https://jazz.net/library/article/1152

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www.ibm.com/software/rational

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© Copyright IBM Corporation 2012. All rights reserved. The information contained in these materials is provided for informational purposes only, and is provided AS IS without warranty of any kind,
express or implied. IBM shall not be responsible for any damages arising out of the use of, or otherwise related to, these materials. Nothing contained in these materials is intended to, nor shall have
the effect of, creating any warranties or representations from IBM or its suppliers or licensors, or altering the terms and conditions of the applicable license agreement governing the use of IBM
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referenced in these materials may change at any time at IBM’s sole discretion based on market opportunities or other factors, and are not intended to be a commitment to future product or feature
availability in any way. IBM, the IBM logo, Rational, the Rational logo, Telelogic, the Telelogic logo, and other IBM products and services are trademarks of the International Business Machines
Corporation, in the United States, other countries or both. Other company, product, or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.
www.ibm.com/software/rational

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Tips & Tricks: Summary
A plan is an actionable interface
Iterations
– Names vs Calendar
Cross project planning
Work Item Exclusion vs Inclusion
Performance recommendations
– Large plans unmanageable
– Build simpler view modes (outsource other plan view modes into separate plans and link them together
so that navigation is easier)
Dashboards
– Dashboard in a plan
– Plan in a dashboard
Additional information:
– Effective Planning with Rational Team Concert 4.0: https://jazz.net/library/article/594