You’re about to get a behind-the-scenes look at our Lean Agile process, tools, and tricks we’ve used to deliver scalable digital products for over 80 companies around the world.
At Revelry, we design digital innovation, which includes building mobile and web products, to help companies go to market and scale faster than their competitors. The companies we work with go on to make their first thousand dollars with an MVP, scale to generate millions of dollars in revenue, and in some cases, they’re even able to grow into tech companies on their own.
We’ve improved on Agile development methodologies to make our process leaner and more innovative. It’s a little different, but it works very, very well — and we want to share it with you because we believe it creates the best software (and it’s fast). We’ve optimized our workflows over 5 years and we’ve developed the Revelry Innovation Stack, a platform of tools that automate repetitive tasks and shorten team meetings by more than half.
If you already have an Agile methodology in place, we hope you’ll find some tools and tricks to help you make it even leaner. (We can also bring our process to your team.
Say hello to Team Revelry and let’s see what we can build together.)
Gerard Ramos
Founder & CEO
Agile is an iterative approach to software development that gained traction on the fringes of developer culture in the early 2000s and has now become a mainstream method. As Agile practitioners, we work in sprints, quickly shipping tangible and high-quality units of software one at a time, starting with the most crucial features and iterating on the product in the following sprints.
In our planning process, we imagine the whole system just long enough to lay out a few architecture rules to keep the system flexible. Then we place one solid brick down before deciding which brick to add next. And on and on until the castle’s built.
Older development methodologies imagine the whole castle upfront and plan every brick in advance. They work backward from their ideal end product, create a detailed spec doc, and go heads-down for a few months to develop the product. Unfortunately, by the time they resurface, business needs have changed. Or, the budget diminishes while the product is still a pile of features that are 80% done. 80% done is worth 0 to a user.
At Revelry, we guard against this with a launch-and-iterate approach that’s extra transparent for our clients. We start with the product’s first grain of core functionality and sprint for a week; developing, testing, and launching a unit of 100% solid software. Then we check in with our partners, identify the next set of crucial features, and start the second sprint. We never create one be-all-end-all spec doc at the start of a project like traditional software consultants might, even though we do just as much planning. It’s simply spread out through the entire development project. We don’t predict; we adapt.
This frequent recalibration ensures that for each one week increment, the team only works on features that support the partner’s current business goals and the most urgent needs of their users.
This system also lets us rapid-launch products — we can get a working prototype or MVP out in the world in as few as 4 sprints. Many of our engagements last 3-6 months, while some partners work with us for up to 12 months to continue iterating. We keep our contracts flexible and invoice incrementally with each one week sprint.
A project is created when we conduct a discovery sprint to clarify business objectives, project goals, and user needs. We work closely as an integrated team (Producer, Designer, Engineer, QA, Client/Product Owner) to define the Project Brief.
Our 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 script. We don’t even have to think about all of our standard project setup tasks. 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:
We invite clients to the Slack channel that we set up for that 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.
Next up, we write the first round of user stories. In the upcoming sprints, these stories enable the team to design and implement that first Core Loop.
The project is broken down into feature requests and essential tasks by writing user stories, which are objectives a user should be able to achieve with the product. Each user story is further defined by acceptance criteria (AC), a checklist of requirements needed to complete the user story.
We develop and launch user stories during each one week sprint. We end the sprint by writing user stories and scoring them before the next sprint’s kickoff meeting. Sprint 2 stories are written in Sprint 1, Sprint 3 stories are written in Sprint 2, and so on.
We tell our clients that one of their most important jobs is to help us write user stories that capture their product vision. They are involved in this step and it’s a collaborative process where multiple people on the team will provide input and the business’s product owner signs off on the final story. Here’s how we write them:
If you’re an Agile fan, you’ll notice that our User Stories differ slightly. Typically, an Agile story headline would look like this: “As a [user type], I want to [perform some action] so that [I can receive some benefit].”
But we’ve adopted an alternative headline format:
“[User Type] – [Feature Bucket/Epic] – [Action or Result]”
We want our User Story headlines to be easier to scan across our project management tools. They should be consistent from story to story. And, we want our project tickets rely increasingly on communicating the business value within the body of the story, where it belongs.
Here are some examples.
These stories become issues in GitHub with a unique identification number. We manage progress by using a Kanban board that automatically visualizes the status of your GitHub Issues.
We include business insights on our stories to help to clarify objectives. Many teams don’t do this, but it’s important at Revelry because it helps our developers and designers understand why they’re building a feature and how it’ll impact other pieces in the larger picture.
For example, if we write a story for a 3D-printing interface like our client Entrescan, we’d include a note about the broader business context. “Entrescan wants to open up 3D printing to people who are new at this and don’t have a printer at home. So, the interface needs to be really simple, and it has to work in a user’s browser without special plugins, to make it more accessible.”
All stories must have acceptance criteria (AC). Anyone on the team can define AC, but the Product Owner (client) must sign off on them. These AC go to the issue description on GitHub as checkboxes.
We write AC as Given, When, Then statements designed to describe specific user behaviors which accomplish business goals:
For example the AC for the “Admin – Reporting & Analytics – Filter Users by Recent Sign In” story might be:
When possible, we also add screenshots or sketches of the desired outcome to add more context for developers and designers as they develop stories. Some companies leave this step out, but we think it’s important because visuals make it easy for our developers to be on the same page as our clients when it comes to their rationale for a story and how it’s connected to others.
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.
So we automated it. 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 (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.
1. Assign Team
We assign a full stack team of 3 to 6 Revelry teammates needed for that sprint: a mix of architect, developer, designers, quality assurance, product, and producer. 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.
2. Revisit 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:
We use GitHub for distributed version control and story tracking, and we use kanban to visualize that progress (it connects to GitHub so it updates our stories automatically).
The story sits in the Backlog column until we move it to This Sprint during the sprint kickoff (when we form the commitment for the sprint). When an engineer starts working a story, they move it to In Progress. As they complete AC, they mark the check boxes.
Once all AC is complete, the code is scanned by Lintron, an automatic style checker we built. Lintron is a pull request robot that we update every time we create a new code standard, and it very consistently catches style and logic issues, freeing up human code reviewers to provide substantive feedback. The results have been great.
When an engineer has addressed Lintron’s notes, they move the story to In-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 deploy the story to internal QA. We use Codeship for automatic deployment and continuous integration, so any code that passes review is available for QA within minutes.
If QA finds an issue with any of the AC, they uncheck the box and send the story back to the engineer. In the case of a large story where just one AC is missed, we close the story and log a new bug. If an edge case arises in QA that isn’t represented by any AC, we log a bug. Once QA’s done we move it to user acceptance testing (UAT).
One of our clients’ most important jobs, alongside helping us write user stories, is to do UAT and use the system every day. If there are issues, they send it back down the chain to engineers. Stories coming back from UAT are the highest priority so we work on them immediately. Getting time from our Product Owners (clients) is tough and when we have them in the mix, we make sure to address their concerns as fast as possible.
When the story’s complete in UAT, we immediately ship the new features to production through another automated deployment.
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.
Each person on the team answers the following questions:
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.
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 crappy, what was awesome, and specific tactics to improve the next sprint’s communication or velocity.
That’s how we do it, folks.
Let’s talk about how and when to escalate things to management. When you’re moving as fast as we do, there are 4 common issues that can derail progress. Here’s how we deal with them without ringing all the alarm bells and slowing people down.
(This problem-solving is the domain of the project’s Producer on the Revelry team, who is responsible for removing blockers, getting questions answered, and facilitating proper channels to solve problems during a sprint.)
Here’s what we tell our teammates when they come up against these common issues:
If you’re an engineer or designer
If you’re a Producer
We use these tools to automate our development — try them out and let us know how they do.
That’s how we turn ideas into businesses. Our process isn’t set in stone and we improve it every day, but it has served us well: 70+ projects and growth fueled through amazing relationships, happy customers, and straight up hustle.
Stay true to the core principles of this Lean Agile process and you can’t go wrong:
Let us know if you try our process and tools. We’d love to hear from you. You can reach us via email at hello@revelry.co.
