Eating our own Dog Foot

We needed a System to efficiently manage development and production using Agile and Toyota Production System. All our stuff is on GitHub and we heavily use GitHub Issues and GitHub Flow. Thus we wanted a system that tightly integrates with them, yet goes beyond the capabilities of the GitHub tools. We could not find it. This is why we build V²Agile System. We hope that it makes live easier for contributors to V² and also that other Organizations on GitHub might find it useful. As always don’t be shy to let us know what you think, report bugs or ideas using GitHub Issues.

Methods

1. GitHub Tools: The GitHub Tools may not look like much and they give you enough rope to hang yourself. That said, we found that when properly used they work exceedingly well.
2. Agile Development: Agile is well documented development method that outputs frequent shippable product increments.
3. Toyota Production System: Long before Kanban and Agile was used to speed up Software development it was used to speed up hardware (as in cars) development and production. Lots of literature is available on the Toyota Production System. We adopted it for standards, electronics and case development and production.
4. V² True North: A vision on how the world will look like in 2021 after the successful introduction of V² showing how V² improves your life. It shows the user where we are going and directs the contributor to go there.
5. Strict Hierarchical Structure: Reaching V² True North is a Big Undertaking. Using a Strict Hierarchical Structure is essential for a Divide and Conquer approach that cuts the Big Undertaking in ever smaller pieces, until they are simple Tasks which are assigned and worked down. We use 7 Levels: True North → Road Map → Campaigns → Milestones → Sprints → Issues → Tasks.
6. Consistent use for all types of Development: We develop: 1) Software, 2) Hardware, 3) Standards 4) Production Methods 5) Documentation 6) Art. All methods have been carefully designed that they work on all 6 types.
7. Add Missing Tools: While we use all available GitHub Tools to manage our projects we added missing tools for: 1) Kanban (Scrum) Boards, 2) Gantt Charts, 3) Road Maps, 4) Dashboard
8. Making the Plan easy to understand: The best way to reach our target in an effective way on time is to deliver easy to find answers to the following questions: 1) Where are we going? 2) What work needs to be done? 3) how to track if we are on time?
9. Easy Documentation: Easy accessible and nice to read documentation increases the odds that contributors work towards the same goal delivering work that is compatible to each other and that their Pull Request are easy to integrate.
10. Visual and Visible Progress: Seeing that you or your colleagues made progress is motivating and as such we added lots of visual progress indicators to the V² Agile Workflow.
11. Easy to Contribute: The success of V² Initiative depends on Contribution. As such it is essential for our success to make contribution easy. The Architecture in V²Agile makes it easy to make 1) Feature Requests / Bug Reports, 2) Contribute Work and 3) Get involved with Management.
12. Clean Access Privileges: Architecture and workflow is designed for clean and strict access privilege management, yet allowing the contributor to work unhindered.

Cross Repo Management

Not everyone needs Cross Repo Management

In fact most GitHub Organization will work well without it. This may be the reason why GitHub has efficient tools to manage development within a repository. It has however no tools whatsoever to coordinate development across repositories. If you are interesting to adapt V²Agile for your Organization, please read → Adapting V²Agile. It also includes a simplified version for this case.

V² needs Cross Repo Management

V² is a Standard Organization and as such we have development going on in parallel in many repositories where development within a repository has dependencies to development within other repositories. Consequently we need management tools to this end. This chapter is an introduction to these tools.

Managing 4 V²Plan Levels with GitHub Issues

GitHub’s key management tool is GitHub Issues. When properly used it works very well. We optimized the structure of V² Plan’s 7 Levels so that we can manage 4 Levels with GitHub Issues:

For more information → V²Plan Reference Manual

Develop V²Plan Tools to manage remaining 3 Levels

The top 3 levels of our V²PLan Architecture have no equivalent GitHub tool. As such we are in the process to develop them:

For more information → V²Plan Reference Manual