Enhancing visibility in agile program increment DSMs

Abstract

Program Increments (PIs) are sequences of consecutive sprints during SAFe implementation of agile developments. SAFe work is planned at two levels of granularity: (i) stories, which create tasks (within a sprint team) and account for task interactions at a fine level of granularity; and (ii) features (often decomposed into stories), which account for interactions at a coarser level of granularity. A common practice in PI planning, involving 10-15 teams, is to suppress interactions at the story level and focus on interactions at the feature level instead. We create two DSMs for a PI planning process one based on story interactions, and another based on feature interactions. We find a nearly 9X increase in interactions at the finer level, i.e. more granular interaction, compared to a DSM based on coarser level interaction data. We discuss theory and practice implications for using more granular DSMs during PI Planning and oversight processes.