Salesforce Agile Accelerator

With over million applications available in the market it can be a bit difficult to determine what can be the best alternative for your business. Take an example, that your company has decided to go Agile, and you have started analyzing the available tools in the market, before even beginning your hunt make your own strategy and a list of criteria to consider the possible solutions. The best way would be to start with a very simple tool and then make changes based on the feedback from the team and evolving situations.

If your company is already using salesforce crm application, why not use free tool provided by salesforce to track your sprints? Yes, you heard it right this tool is free! One of my favorite yet powerful agile tool is Salesforce Agile accelerator. It can be easily integrated with any of your ticket/Incident tracking application which can reflect in the scrum user stories. 

What’s cool about this tool?

• Create your own fun reports and dashboards
• Define your team members and their roles
• Create new user stories and break them into tasks
• Customize your own user story status
• Allot user story points
• Filter your closed or open items
• Custom list views for each team member to track assigned work
• Track your team’s velocity
• Burn down charts
• Salesforce agile accelerator does not need a separate training
• Tracking your Sprint work on the same platform is convenient
• View your backlog, back burner and current sprint work on same page
• Drag and drop tasks
• Track your release with your team velocity
• Predict your upcoming sprint velocity
• Assign your tasks in hours with respect to story points
• See your team’s work allocation in charts
• Add or remove items in the middle of the sprint to fit your timeline.
• Login to a team member to see the changes
• Get real time updates
• Create record types for work based on work category- bug, defect, enhancement, analysis etc.

 FAQ’s

Q1. How can I get access to Salesforce Agile Accelerator?

        Good News!!!!! Salesforce Agile Accelerator is now available on App Exchange for free. Click here to download it.


Refer my blog article "Salesforce Agile Accelerator Installation Steps". 

Q2. What is the url for agile accelerator?

       Salesforce agile accelerator would be a separate sandbox.

       URL would be similar to your org’s sandbox

       For example- https://test.salesforce.com/

Q3. Login credentials?

       Login credentials would be similar to your org’s production username followed by .agile

       For example- @1-2-3-SFDC.com.agile

Are you new to scrum?Take a look at my Scrum Framework Post for scrum basics before jumping into Salesforce Agile Accelerator.

Let’s take a tour of Salesforce Agile accelerator

We are already familiar with most of the Tabs highlighted in the screenshot below 

1. Home Page: Home page includes components like side bar, recent items, messages, alerts etc. You can also include custom components of your choice. 
2. Chatter: Chatter feature includes feeds, groups, profiles etc. Team can post, discuss and collaborate sprint work on chatter.
3. Profile: There is no separate profile or role. If you are already setup in salesforce you will have the same profile and role assigned to you. Usually Scrum team has full access to agile accelerator.
4. Reports and Dashboard: Salesforce provides standard reports package for scrum team which is readily available for use. However team can also build their own reports and create custom dashboards.

Sample standard reports-

• Team allocation
• Story points per sprint
• Work create per month
• Planned vs actual task hours
• Work progress etc.

Standard Dashboard-

• Salesforce agile accelerator (Installed Package Dashboad)

5. Work: 

Work is a multipurpose object that defines bugs, defects, incidents, user stories, test cases etc. You can create your own record types and custom page layouts depending on the type of work that your team handles.

Take an example-1-2-3-SFDC org scrum team works on enhancements, Incidents, new features, analysis. This would become record types of the work followed by custom page layouts.

• Analysis: Issues that need research and diagnosis
• Enhancement: Big enhancements
• User Story: Used to create the new features in the existing system
• Incident: Used to track day to day user problems

8. SPRINT:

The list of current sprint work can be located under Sprint tab on virtual wall.

On virtual wall you can:

• Inline Editing like Subject etc.
• Change the Status for user story
• Ability to edit story points
• Drill down to an individual from virtual wall
• Chat from the virtual wall

Drag and drop work and re prioritize things

Move work from the current sprint to the next Sprint

Reassign the task to the team member, adjust the story points.

Collaborate with your team on chatter

Create new work from the top right side of the virtual wall

Virtual Wall Views-

There are two types of view available for virtual wall:

• Compact view (Take a quick glance at the current sprint work)
• Expanded view ( Take a look at the tasks and their status)

User Story

Product owner assign the user stories to the team, either team members or the product owner breakdown the user stories into tasks. Estimated time to finish each tasks is recorded in hours.

In 1-2-3-SFDC John has been assigned User story to create approval process for tele business team. John can click on the user story to find more specific details, related documents, BRD, attachments etc.

User story has already been assigned the story points when during sprint planning meeting. Now john will breakdown the user story in to small tasks. The number of hours on the tasks should add up to the story points on the user story. For example- Story Point 5 = 18 hours
When John actually starts working on the tasks, the user story status will be changed to in progress. 

As John will change the amount of remaining work, or move tasks from one state to another, the amount of remaining work for that column updates to reflect his changes on the charts.

Tasks will be moved from in planned to in progress and then finally completed one by one. 

Each user story has unique definition of what will be delivered. In this example production deployment is the final delivery to the stakeholders. Once the deployment is done, user story can be closed. User story automatically disappears from the virtual wall once it is closed. 

Sprint Details

Here you will find the details of your current sprint. 1-2-3-SFDC org has two weeks long sprints. Total number of working days for this Sprint beginning Jan 5^th to Jan 16^th is 10, working hours is 6.At the end of each sprint the teams will have retrospective meetings and discussion like goals, risks, what went well etc…these can be tracked under other information section of sprint details. 

Sprint Burn down Charts

This is the graphical representation of work left to do versus time. Task and task management can be graphically visualized under charts. Ideal velocity is highlighted in red and the actual team velocity is shown in blue. The tasks assigned on the virtual wall reflect in the chart. Scrum master can take decisions on whom to assign work based on the chart. An assignees can be over or under assigned which can be easily pointed out with the green blue and red bar charts. Burn down chart is updated everyday and is the graphical view of the team's progress.

Team Velocity

Review the work of the team completed during previous sprints under team velocity. How much did your team deliver in each sprints and what is the team’s ability for future sprints 

6.Unified Wall:

Unified wall is a one stop tool to prioritize list of items for the release. Product owner can drag and drop stories between sprints, add panels from the unified wall and view the backlog, back-burner, current sprint work, previous sprints all on one page. During Sprint planning product owners can easily filter the panel selection to know what items are in the backlog and which of those have not been assigned to the team.Unified wall has some great features of viewing data in the form of panels based on the selection criteria.