kanban - class of service (to manage incidents in a devops team)

KANBAN – CLASS OF

SERVICE

BY ANURAG SHRIVASTAVA

SOLVING THE INCIDENTS AND OTHER UN-

PREDICTABLES IN A DEVOPS TEAM

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Few would question that an issue

resulting in 10,000 users being

unable to access the system and

costing EUR 100,000 in revenue per

hour deserves special treatment,

compared to a feature under

development. But how do we make

sure that we choose the most

reasonable way of processing these

different types of work?

Types of Work in a DevOps

Team

Typical types of work include:

• User Stories (Small, Medium, Large)

• Bugs (Cosmetic, Critical, Blocker)

• Manual Reports

• Textual Edits

• Support Tasks

• Installation

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Standard Class• Work types: Cosmetic Bugs, User stories

• Special treatment: None

Priority Class• Work Types: Critical bugs, High priority user stories.

• Special treatment: Takes priority at each stage.

Fixed Deadline Class• Work Types: User Stories

• Special treatment: Takes priority at each stage if deadline is deemed unsafe.

Otherwise, it is treated as a standard class. Emergency deployed if necessary.

Expedite Class• Work Types: Blocker Bug

• Special treatment: Break WIP limits, stop existing WIP, emergency deploy 4

Class of Service by Color

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Class of Service by Swim Lane

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Remarks

DevOps team commits on delivering sprint backlog and reserved 10% reserved time for incidents

In case of no incidents during the sprint, the devops team would deliver more story points to account for 10% time for incidents

When the team can’t deliver more than 50% of committed story points due to a major incident the sprint is aborted and fresh sprint planning is done when the incident has been resolved

When the team needs more than 10% reserved time to solve incidents then number of committed story points in the sprint backlog are reduced proportionally 7