Training Sandbox Guide

This guide turns a fresh training sandbox into a training session. You sign in as each of the sandbox's practice accounts in turn and work through the parts of DevStride that person uses, in the Acme Enterprise demo organization.

Work through it in order the first time; each section stands on its own after that. A full pass takes about an hour.

Before you start

• Create a sandbox under Configure Settings → Organization → Training Sandboxes if you have not already (see Training Sandboxes). Set Reads as "today" to today's date, so the demo's current sprint and planning increment really are current.
• Find the usernames. That page lists them next to your sandbox, with its sign-in link (/login?sandbox=<sandbox-name>). Share the link with trainees: on the sign-in page it opens, the (i) beside the username field lists every practice username, and one click fills it in. Every username follows the pattern acme.<sandbox-name>.<role>. The password is the one you set when you created the sandbox, or at its last reset.
• Sign out of your own account before signing in as a practice account. Your own account is not a member of the sandbox, and a sandbox never appears in your organization switcher.

The cast

The customer side is played by Lena Ortiz at Globex, through the sandbox's customer portal (see The customer side).

Each account sees what its permissions allow, so a board can look full for one person and nearly empty for another. That difference is part of what you are here to learn.

Plan a program increment (Riley Reed, RTE)

Sign in as acme.<sandbox>.rte.

1. Open Plan Delivery, then Scaled Agile Example → Enterprise 1 → ART 1.1. The ART's boards are its Program Backlog and one board per program increment (PI). Open ART 1.1 — PI 2, the one marked Current.
2. The board holds the features this release train has planned for the increment, in New, In Progress and Done. Some due dates are already red: those features are overdue.
3. Exercise: re-plan a feature. Open Decisioning API. In the panel on the right, expand Assignment, click Cycle / Board and choose ART 1.1 — PI 3. Close the panel: the feature has left the PI 2 board, and it now appears on PI 3.
4. Open Track Progress. Pick Product Roadmap in the roadmap picker; the page may open on another roadmap. Click the toolbar button Scroll the chart to today's date to bring today into view.
5. The roadmap shows three initiatives (Originations Platform, Risk & Compliance and Lending & Growth) and four milestones linked by dependencies. Regulatory Sign-off is red because it is due after GA Launch, the milestone it blocks. Use Scenarios to compare alternative plans.
6. Open Map Value to see the same work as a tree of workstreams, from Product down to the features you just planned.

Run the sprint (Sam Stone, Scrum Master)

Sign out, then sign in as acme.<sandbox>.scrummaster.

1. Open Plan Delivery. Under Quick Access, open Delivery Board (Continuous Flow → Delivery). Sam sees the stories assigned to him and his QA work.
2. Exercise: move work. Drag Harden the rate quote from New to In Progress.
3. Exercise: log time. Open Harden the rate quote and go to its Time tab. Click New Entry, enter 1:30 and a short description, and Save. The total time spent goes up, and your entry sits beside the ones Sam and Riley logged earlier.
4. Exercise: add a dependency. Still on that story, click the Relationships button in the panel's toolbar. Next to Dependencies, click Manage, search for Implement the rate quote, tick it and Save. The story now waits on that one, and the toolbar button shows how many of its dependencies are complete.
5. Exercise: read a report. Open Measure Performance and choose Burn Down: it charts the last 14 days of work. Then choose Velocity, click Select Cycles, search for Team 1.1.1 — Sprint 2, tick two finished sprints and click Select Cycles to compare them.

Work the Service Desk (Maya Morgan, support agent)

Sign out, then sign in as acme.<sandbox>.member.

1. Open Service Desk. The Inbox lists the open tickets for Maya's team: requests from Acme's customer companies (Globex, Initech, Northwind Traders and others), arriving by email, the portal, the API and text message. Solved tickets are not shown in this view.
2. Search for Gantt dependency lines render red for valid dependencies and open it. The Description tab shows what the customer reported.
3. Exercise: reply to the customer. Open the Discussion tab and click Add Comment. Reply to customer is selected; the line under the editor names the customer who will see it. Write a short reply and click Comment. The reply is marked External: the customer sees it on the portal.
4. Exercise: close the ticket. In the panel on the right, set Status to Done.

The customer side

The person who created the sandbox, or last reset it, can sign in to its customer portal as Lena Ortiz, a customer at Globex. The portal sign-in uses your own email address, so you do this yourself rather than with a practice account.

1. On the Training Sandboxes page, follow the link to the Globex portal shown next to the sandbox.
2. Enter your own email address and click Send login link. Open the email and follow the link, or type its six-digit code. You are signed in to the Globex Help Center as Lena Ortiz.
3. My requests lists Lena's tickets, open and past; Company requests adds the ones her Globex colleagues share; Shared lists holds the Open requests overview the support team publishes to Globex.
4. Exercise: raise a request. Click Submit a request and type export into What do you need help with?: matching help articles appear before you go any further, which is how the portal heads off tickets that already have an answer. Click Start next to Support Request, give it a title and a description, and click Submit. A receipt is emailed to you.
5. Exercise: watch it arrive. Sign in to the app as acme.<sandbox>.member again. The new request is in the Service Desk inbox as a new ticket for the Service Team. It is also on the Support Triage board, where incoming requests are routed automatically.

The executive view (Olivia Owens, owner)

Sign out, then sign in as acme.<sandbox>.owner.

1. Open Plan Delivery, then Scaled Agile Example → Program → PI 2 Objectives. Each objective carries a business value and is marked Committed or not; PCI re-certification and Harden audit logging are this increment's.
2. Open Measure Performance. Current Progress shows open work by persona, including demand nobody can staff yet: a UX Designer persona that two upcoming stories need and nobody on the team holds.
3. Olivia's Quick Access in Plan Delivery holds Enterprise 1 Epic Backlog, the portfolio's epics.

Read-only reporting (Victor Vance, viewer)

Sign out, then sign in as acme.<sandbox>.viewer.

Victor can open every report under Measure Performance, but he cannot create or change work: the Item button is unavailable and there is no Service Desk in his menu. Run Velocity as you did for Sam and compare the counts: a report only counts the items its reader is allowed to see.

Knowledge base

Knowledge Base in the menu lists the help articles Acme publishes: getting started, managing work, reporting, billing and integrations, plus internal runbooks staff can see but customers never do. Owners and administrators can edit articles and comment on them.

Things to know

• Plan Delivery reopens the last board you looked at. Use the breadcrumb at the top of the page to get back to the folder tree.
• The Time Allocation Matrix (Measure Performance → Time Allocation Matrix) needs a date range covering the last three weeks before it shows the demo's logged time.
• Jira and Azure DevOps are not connected in the demo organization, so their screens stay on the Connect page.
• Usernames are listed on the Training Sandboxes page, and behind the (i) on the sandbox's sign-in link, so you never need to remember them.