Agile telemetry at OVHCloud – Part III

This article is the third part in a series of articles, we recommend reading Part 1 and Part 2 first:

• The birth of agile telemetry at OVHcloud – Part I
• Agile telemetry at OVHCloud – Part II

In the final post relating to agile telemetry, we focus on the micro-vision. In any project, keeping micro and macro vision separate is vital for effective communication.

Macro and Micro vision

For development teams, micro-vision is crucial. While a macro perspective is important for meeting goals such as delivery deadlines, overseeing the micro details of a development ensures a product is good quality. Here is how we managed to achieve this important goal:

Micro-Vision

This part of our Dashboard displays three important pieces of information relating to the progress of our sprints: the expected, the unexpected and the reason for the unexpected.

(1) This is the progress of the current sprint and its percentage of completion. The percentage of completion is simply computed:

(2) This highlights the number of times the development team has gone out of its sprint to fix something and the completion times. The attached graph shows the peak days when the team was mobilized.

To report this type of information:

• Teams add in the “Label” field on JIRA the title: impediment.
• They log the time spent in the “log work” field on JIRA.

The accumulated information is then visible in our dashboard. This helps us to understand why a sprint does not progress. When teams go through weeks of troubleshooting, we can explain why.

NB: It is essential to separate the sprint from your impediments. These two pieces of information allow you to compare the “expected” and the “unexpected”. This allows us to propose 2 types of graphs.

(3) The last part highlights why the teams intervened when they came out of their sprint. This precious data gives us a clear vision of the situation. If a team spends 90% of its time dealing with a bug, or troubleshooting in support, it informs decisions making processes for future projects.

Example : We provide 30 hours of bug correction time during the sprints; should we focus on creating something new, or reducing the technical debt?

Conclusion : Today, Agile telemetry is used by 19 teams at OVHCloud. It facilitates and allows us to measure the performance and progress of the teams remotely, and in real time. It also provides us with the up-to-date information we need to conduct our projects. It is this methodology that has won Innovations Awards for OVHCloud employees.

If you want to dive into Agile Telemetry you can do it now!! Simply grab our open source dashboard and our bot Jerem.