The @GreenHopperTeam surveyed our customers in June to learn more about how teams are using the product today. We’ve done this in the past and will do it again in the future as it is a great way to see how teams and organisations evolve over time. We use this information to inform our roadmap, so thank you to all those who participated!
To be included in future surveys please ensure you have GreenHopper selected under Technical Alerts in the My Atlassian Communications Center.
So, what did we find? Estimation?
Nearly half of respondents estimate using story points, another third estimate in hours. As for when these estimates are added it is a fairly evenly distributed between:
- when the story is added to the backlog (this surprised me),
- when the story is likely to be included in a future sprint backlog, and
- when the story is added to the sprint backlog
What else? Roadmaps!
It was interesting to learn that over half of you have difficulty keeping the roadmap up to date alongside changing priorities while at the same time planning those roadmaps three (32%), six (33%) and twelve (21%) months in advance. This is from a smaller sample as 20% of respondents do not actually conduct any roadmap planning.
For what it’s worth, at Atlassian we’re looking out six months with fairly solid roadmaps that cover the big areas of functionality (Epics). Lots of smaller pieces drop into releases that simply aren’t captured on the roadmap as they are too granular for the audience.
Sprints
75% of respondents use sprints. I’m guessing these folks are now moving on to the Scrum board, if not now is the time to look at it. Of those planning sprints, half are running two week sprints and 20% are running three week sprints
How about deployment?
A whopping 19% of customers are releasing continuously and a quarter release at the end of each sprint – brilliant!
For those releasing continuously they are pushing a story into production when it reaches done. Continuous deployment is pretty easy when the team is using Bamboo to assist with the deployment. If you were in this group you may be interested to learn about a Codegeist entry that enables you to start Bamboo builds as you drag a card into a new column on the board – the HTTP Request Workflow Function. Ping me at nmuldoon@atlassian.com if you want more info on how to set this up as you may need some hand holding.
Development practices?
Three quarters of y’all do standups. What are the rest of you doing?! Sit downs over coffee I guess, let me know in the comments below.
Lots of teams are conducting retrospectives, sprint demos and continuous integration (again, why isn’t this everyone?!). An encouraging number are conducting TDD, still I figure this could be more. For those of you looking to adopt TDD you may like to look at Behave for Jira.
Until next time, thanks for your participation and keep an eye out for the latest and greatest GreenHopper, to be released in just a few weeks.