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Changelab

We are conducting experiments as part of Changelab to improve our methodology. This is a living document that will be updated as we learn more.

Whitespace currently has one delivery team, Team Panda. The goal is that the team should be cross-functional, meaning that the team should be able to deliver a complete product from start to finish. The team should be able to design, develop, test, deploy and maintain the product.

Team board​

Team board: https://trello.com/b/pFQ97N6y/team-panda

The team follow the basic principles of Kanban when working with the team board:

  1. The board contains stories, i.e. atomic units of work, represented by cards.
  2. Each story has a status. The possible statuses are represented by lists.
  3. The focus of the team is to complete stories instead of start working on new ones. Therefore cards should always be processed from right to left.
  4. If the team is not able to complete a story, it should be marked as blocked and a comment should be added explaining why. Stories are marked as blocked when the team is waiting for support from the platform (see below).
  5. Stories are labeled with the name of the project so that it is possible to create a view of a signle project by filtering on the label.
  6. The team assigns stories to the person that is currently working on the story.

The possible statuses for stories are:

  1. To do – Stories that are ready for the team to work on.
  2. Architecture – The team discusses the solution with the system architect (see below)
  3. Ongoing – The team is actively working on the story. Each story should be assigned to a team member
  4. Quality Assurance – Another team member tests the solution to ensure good quality and validate that the story is solved accordning to the spec.
  5. User Acceptance Testing – The team is done and the client is testing the solution.
  6. Delivered – The story is solved, tests have passed and it has been pushed to production.

Kanban meeting​

The team has a meeting once a day to update the board so that it represents the current status and to discuss what needs to be done to move the stories forward. Does the assigned person need help from someone else in the team or the platform? This is different from a daily standup where the team members inform each other about what they have done and what they are going to do. The focus is how the team can help each other to complete the stories.

Platform​

To support the team we have a platform of roles that can provide these services:

  • Infrastructure: A devops team that provides hosting, CI tools, etc
  • Architecture: A system architect that can help make the smartest technical decisions and decide on what should be added to the Jamstack product.
  • IT support: A team that can help with IT related issues, such as setting up a new computer, projects, etc.
  • Client support: A support team that handles first-line support for clients and delegates to the team when needed.
  • Project lead: A team of project managers that facilitate the communication between the client and the team.