Agile for the Program
In the previous section, we introduced the Team level the place where the software teams define, develop, and test the software for the solution. At the next higher program level we suggest an organization, process, and requirements model that provides mechanisms to harness some number of agile teams to a larger enterprise purpose the delivery of an entire product to the customers.
Features
The primary goal of the Product Vision is to communicate the strategic intent of the product. Vision is best expressed by Features in the agile world. Features describe what the product can do for its users, and the benefits the user derive from them.
Managing features
Features would be most efficiently represented by issues in a custom feature tracker in Codebeamer. Although this tracker type is not available out of the box, you can implement it easily by creating a requirement type tracker and customizing that.
We suggest adding the following fields to a feature tracker. Some of them may be omitted in your configuration:
• Realizes: A reference field to the Epic (an issue in the epic tracker) which a particular feature realizes.
• Value: Estimate of how much benefit users can derive from a feature.
• Effort: Rough estimate of how much work implementing a feature takes (in story points).
• ROI: Computed field with the formula value/effort, the first approximation of Return on Investment.
• Cost of Delay (CoD): The penalty for not delivering the feature on time.
After the feature tracker is in place, you manage features the same way like any other type of issues.
Agile Release Train (ART)
Please see the ART detailed in the Releases and in the Managing Releases and Sprints sections above.