Frequency Agile Process Flow
We will be doing 2 week iterations that will end on a Friday and start on a Monday. In the future this might change if there is team consensus on a new start day and end day. The goal is to wrap up an iteration on a Friday to close a week out and start fresh on a Monday. Internal releases will also be cut at the end if each iteration.
Planning meetings will be held on the Monday at the beginning of an iteration cycle. Planning meetings are a time to get the buy-in from the team on the work for the iteration we are about to start. This is a time for raising of red flags on the work previously groomed and prioritized, adjustment of any story points and, claiming work and pairs. Planning is not the time for technical details. If technical details are not defined enough we will want to take it into a grooming session offline.
Grooming meetings are to create, update or reposition issues in git/zenhub with the business value they add, and the acceptance criteria that will need to be met to consider for an issue to be resolved/feature complete. This can be any kind of issue (bug, full work scope, chore, tech debt, an epic and even the review of a spike or design document) Grooming meeting cadence will be set by the project lead and the PM. Some project leads will have days and times they want set aside for grooming, and others might like the adhoc version and do these on demand as they are fresh in their mind. The bulk of the grooming communication (outside of calls) will be done in the project slack channel.
Pointing should be part of grooming. When this is not possible as part of grooming we will just post the zenhub link in slack and ask for the team to give their estimate. Zenhub uses a fibonacci (pretty standard )for pointing. During iteration planning we can review and repoint things if we believe they have changed before the work starts. If pointing wasn't done in grooming the TPM will make sure the correct people are added to the zen/github issue to point before the planning session starts.
We are using zenhub to house our Epics that will serve as a parent container for the related work needed to complete the larger goal of the business value that will be defined in the epic. After the business value of an epic has been defined the team will review/groom the epic and if the epic is larger in size and or net-new to the system the dev team will create a design doc (see template here) in an effort to clearly define the technical aspects of the full implementation. After the design doc has been approved the team will use the artifact to then help break down the epic into smaller issues/tasks/chores etc.
Retrospectives will be held on the Friday the iteration ends. We will use the standard retro format (review last retros action items, what went well this iteration, what could have gone better this iteration, do we need to change anything in our process, and define action any action items from retro learnings)
This meeting is held weekly on Monday to give project leads a chance to update other teams and leadership status on projects, as blocking questions that need answers and to understand what other teams are working on. As we start to grow one team's output might be another's input and we would like there to be an open line of communication across different teams and disciplines within the organization.