Data model enhancements from Agile Development 1.0 to Agile Development 2.0
Summarize
Summary of Data Model Enhancements from Agile Development 1.0 to Agile Development 2.0
Agile Development 2.0 introduces significant data model enhancements that streamline the management of agile teams and their associated tasks compared to Agile Development 1.0. These improvements facilitate better integration with the ServiceNow platform, allowing for more efficient workflows and reporting.
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Key Features
- Standardization of Assignment Groups: Agile Development 2.0 replaces the separate Release Team entity with the common platform construct of Assignment Groups to map agile teams, enabling standardized reporting and oversight by group managers.
- Independent Group Creation: Unlike Agile Development 1.0, where teams needed to be created for each release, Agile Development 2.0 allows for the creation of groups independent of releases, facilitating ongoing project management across multiple releases.
- Sprint Creation Flexibility: In Agile Development 1.0, sprints were tied to releases, restricting their creation. Agile Development 2.0 allows sprints to be associated with Assignment Groups, enabling greater flexibility in sprint management.
- Ongoing Team Backlogs: Teams can maintain a backlog that is independent of specific releases, allowing them to pull stories and execute them continuously through sprints.
- New Release-Group Association Table: The introduction of the m2mreleasegrouplist table enables the storage of group and release associations, which is crucial for calculating release capacity without affecting sprint generation.
Key Outcomes
As a result of these enhancements, ServiceNow customers can expect improved agility, better resource management, and enhanced reporting capabilities. Teams will be able to manage their workflows more effectively, adapt to changing project requirements, and maintain a clearer view of their overall capacity and performance across multiple releases.
Agile Development 2.0 offers a few data model enhancements over Agile Development 1.0.
Use of the common platform construct — Assignment Group
To map an agile team (scrum team), Agile Development 1.0 uses a separate entity called the Release Team table ( scrum_pp_team). This entity is associated to a release entity as displayed in the following screen shot.
All other tasks on platform such as incidents, problems, changes, projects rely on the assignment group entity to make assignments to a group. Group managers can run reports on an assignment group to gain insight into the work assigned to their groups.
To standardize the use of a group across platform even for scrum work such as stories and tasks, the standard construct Assignment Group is used as opposed to the standalone entity Release Team. Agile Development 2.0 uses assignment groups to map agile teams. An assignment group of type Agile Team is used for defining an agile team.
Agile team (group) need not be created for each release
With Agile Development 1.0, teams are to be created for each release and the teams are to be associated to each release. For example, if a scrum team called Team — Alpha works on multiple quarterly releases. You cannot create the team for one time and associate the team to any release, or release over release. Each time a new release is created, you must create a team with the same name and associate team to the release.
Sprints can be created without a release
Team backlog can be maintained independent of release
Typically, a team can have an ongoing team backlog release after release, it can pull stories from its backlog, and execute them through sprints in the release.
With Agile Development 1.0, a team cannot be defined without defining a release. Hence, team backlog cannot be maintained independent of a release.
With Agile Development 2.0, an assignment group is not created within a release. It can be associated to the release, but not created within a release. Hence, an assignment group can maintain its own backlog.
Association between Release and Group
As there is no direct relation between a release and a group in Agile Development 2.0 (groups are independent and do not have to create groups for each release), the m2m_release_group_list table has been introduced. This table stores the association of a group with a release. This association is not used for sprint generation, but is used to derive the capacity of a release.| Team | Start Sprint | End Sprint | Points (each sprint) | Total Group Capacity For Release |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | A_Sprint 1 | A_Sprint 3 | 30 | 90 (3*30) |
| B | B_Sprint 1 | B_Sprint 4 | 40 | 160 (4*40) |