Our Lean Agile Approach to Digital Innovation

Step 1: Project Inception

The first step of every project is Discovery.

These exercises clarifies business objectives, project goals, and user needs. Each development team is composed of at least one Product Manager, Front-end Designer, Engineer, and Client/Product Owner.  Together, this team works together to define the Project Brief.

The Project Brief lists the details of who we are building for, what problem we are trying to solve, and why that problem matters. We establish what the smallest valuable Core Loop through the product looks like. That’s where we’ll start. The project might be an MVP web product, new mobile app, a digital marketing campaign, or a complete end-to-end digital transformation of existing business practices.

After setting up the Project Brief, we run our starter stories from a Slackbot script.

This mostly automated sequence ensures that each project is set up in the same way and no part of the process is left up to chance. The first 20 or 30 tasks involved in the setup of a new project used to take hours, or even a day, to complete. Now, the Slackbot script will perform these tasks in about 10 seconds:

• Create the project in GitHub
• Add the Project Brief template
• Connect the Agile tools
• Set up permissions
• Generate the first batch of stories

Next, we invite clients to a Slack channel.

We set up a shared Slack channel for each project so that the whole team sees the conversation and development as it unfolds. This full transparency is another area where Revelry differs from typical software and innovation companies.

Step 2: Writing User Stories

Next up, we write our first issues in user story format. Issues are the lifeblood of our projects. They contain the ingredients for how our product works. Think of them like bricks that build a good house. Some issues need to be worked (or laid) before the others. Sometimes we need to research the best way to build a feature before we write the issues for building the feature, and sometimes we need to have a designer design a feature before we implement it into an app. We should write issues for everything we are working on, as soon as we can, even if those things are rather intangible, like research or a bug that is hard to reproduce.

Writing our issues in a “user story” format enables our team to design and implement from the perspective of the user that the functionality will affect.

We tell our partners that one of their most important jobs is to help us write user stories that capture their product vision for their users. It’s a collaborative process. Multiple people on the team will provide input and the partner’s product owner signs off on the final story. For instance, we might ask a UX designer to review a user story before final approval. Here’s how we write our stories.

Step 3: Scoring User Stories

Once stories are written and approved, we need to figure out how difficult and complex they are so we can prioritize our resources for the next sprint. This happens during the story scoring process, which estimates the amount of effort we’ll put into each story relative to other stories.

Team members cast their personal votes and then we calculate the average score for each story. A democratic process like this can take awhile, and it wasn’t uncommon to spend 2 hours on a scoring meeting at Revelry, which ate a lot of developer hours.

We automated the scoring process and our meeting time dropped to 45 minutes or less.

We built a Slack bot, /poker, that prompts each team member for their vote on a story, calculates the average, and moves on to the next story. The bot hides story scores until everyone has cast their estimate, so we don’t influence one another’s answers, then uncovers them with a /poker reveal.

It’s essentially a virtual, automated polling system that cuts out over an hour of inefficiency. This really adds up when you use it every week for a team of 3-6 people. Plus, we’re all in the meeting at the same time, but we can be on opposite coasts or in different countries and have an equal hand in the quick meeting.

Then, we queue up the new user stories.

To do this, we write them, define AC, score them, and put them into GitHub, in preparation for the first sprint. If Revelry joins up with a client’s team while a project is already in motion, then that team needs to have the stories written and scored before the first sprint with Revelry.

Step 4: Sprint Kickoff

Each sprint begins with a kickoff meeting.

First, we assign the team.

We look at the needs of the project and assign Revelry teammates needed for that sprint: this could include software engineers, designers, or product managers. We sometimes create developer/developer and developer/designer pairs and place them into existing teams.

One thing that’s unique about working with Revelry is that you have access to teammates who have deep industry specialties. You can bring on a finance tech expert who used to work at Capital One, or someone from IBM, or even load up on designers if your project is design-heavy. We build you a team that’s the best in the business for that sprint.

Another important teammate is the Product Owner: usually a point person on the client’s team who serves as the ultimate decision maker on everything related to the product. On most projects, the Product Owner co-writes the user stories with Revelry and is–as much as possible–involved in the day-to-day of the sprint. If the client can’t play the role of Product Owner, we provide that as a service, bringing fully written stories to the client for approval and user testing.

Next, we re-visit stories.

During kickoff, we revisit the stories we wrote and scored in the previous sprint, prioritize them, and make individual commitments to get ‘em done. We also make sure to:

• List dependencies and potential blockers in the story’s GitHub ticket as check boxes.
• Link up any stories that must be completed prior to work on an individual story using GitHub #issuenumber, which also calls out dependencies.
• Assign issues to teammates that we need answers or feedback from.

Step 5: Working the Sprint

During a given sprint week, the assigned team works the user stories. Here’s how we do it.

Working stories in Github

GitHub provides distributed version control and story tracking. Here is how we use github boards to visualize that progress.

• Every week, we meet with our product owners to identify the next up priorities for the team
• These stories should be written, approved, and scored before the beginning of the following week, so they are ready for the team in the Implement column.
• At Sprint Kickoff, we review our accomplishments from the previous week, talk about what we are working on next, and work through any blockers to those priorities.
• When an engineer starts working a story, they assign themselves.
• As they complete the Acceptance Criteria, they mark the check boxes.
• Once all AC is complete, the code is scanned by Lintron, an automatic style checker we built
• When an engineer has addressed Lintron’s notes, they move the story to In-Review (a.k.a. Code Review) and assign their pull request (PR) to a different engineer on the team (or in the company).
• Once the code is reviewed in-depth by a second Reveler, we move the issue to the Quality Assurance (QA) column. We use Codeship for automatic deployment and continuous integration, so any code that passes review is available for QA within minutes.
• When in QA, another team member should be able to pick up the ticket and test it. If they find that the ticket does not meet the pre-approved AC, they uncheck the box and send the issue back to the engineer in the Implement column. If an edge case arises in QA that isn’t represented by any AC, we log a separate issue. Sometimes we play jazz, and kick the ticket back for a very small fix that was not covered in the AC.
• Once QA is complete, we move it to user acceptance testing (UAT). One of our partners’ most important jobs is to do UAT and use their product every day. If there are issues with meeting the AC, they send it back down the chain to Implement. If there are other issues, we hash it out in comments and discussions, write tickets, and prioritize accordingly. Issues that don’t meet the AC coming back from either QA or UAT automatically become the highest priority in comparison to other work in progress or unworked prioritized tickets.
• When the issue has passed UAT, we mark the issue as done. If there is a production (live, user facing) environment, we then deploy the feature to production as soon as the next release is slated, or in some cases immediately through automated deployment.

Daily standups

Our daily standup meetings happen in Slack, and are complete in 10 minutes or less. We’ve seen many benefits: Slack is quicker than getting everyone on the phone, and managers can quickly skim through the notes on multiple projects to get their pulse.

We use the built-in Slack /reminder command to run our scrum meetings for us automatically. (Here’s a closer look at how we do it). It sends a reminder to the team to round everyone up and reinforce our scrum philosophy.

In a Standup, each person on the team answers the following questions:

• What did you do yesterday? include issue number
• What are you planning today? include issue number
• How are you blocked? ask for help & set reminders
  • We note blockers and take them offline to be addressed. Do not solve problems on standups.
  • If we need to hash anything out face-to-face, we quickly jump on a zoom.us call.
• All updates need to reference a specific issue number, and by the end of the meeting, we’ve updated all the stories to reflect their current status.

Step 6: Lean Agile Sprint Wrap-up

During the week, we have also been writing new stories for the next sprint. Often we will run a session of planning poker at the end of the week to prepare for the next sprint kickoff.

Every other week, the team has a retrospective conversation. We discuss what felt bad, what was awesome, and specific tactics to improve the next sprint’s communication or velocity.

Start Sprint 2

• Kickoff
• Build
• QA & UAT
• Write and score stories for Sprint 3

Rinse and repeat.

That’s how we do it, folks.

We use these tools to automate our software development process. Reach out to learn more about how we use them.

• Automated Slack Standups
• Codeship
• Dependabot
• Generate starter stories
• Github Actions
• Github Boards – Automatically-updated visualization of Issues
• GitHub – User Stories and Story tracking
• Issue Bot — Slack bot for creating GitHub issues
• Issue-Lookup
• Lintron – automatic style checker
• /Poker – Slack bot for efficient story scoring
• Reusable Stories
• Rollbar
• Slack
• Start a project command
• Travis CI/CD – Automatic code deployment and continuous integration