How Does Your Team Manage Work / Deadlines

Hi devs,

I'm curious to get better data around how teams and work together with agile and deadlines to get work done.

I have a few questions:

1. How do you manage bugs in your sprint?
2. What does your product lifecycle look like for a feature?
3. How does QA fit into the product cycle?
4. Do you use sprint pointing and do you find it useful?
5. What does a backlog grooming session or sprint planning look like?
6. How is architecture managed over time?

Any answers help - thank you!

Comments

[Dylan Anthony]

I got most of the way through answering and the Dev PWA restarted on me and I lost my answer. So it’ll be shorter this time 👻.

1. If we find a bug in QA it gets fixed right away. If it’s in production it gets prioritized with everything else.

2. Design -> dev -> CI -> QA -> code review -> release

3. Stage 4 above

4. No but we also don’t do sprints- Kanban and continuous delivery

5. For the most part we don’t do those things, backlog constantly evolves as needs change. No sprints.

6. Any piece of code that’s touched should be improved. Fridays are tech debt days, just improve existing stuff to keep anything from getting rusty.

Not directly applicable because we don’t do sprints but hopefully helpful. Happy to answer questions :)

[Kaleb M]

Thanks for writing them up twice my friend! Sounds like a tech debt Friday each week is really helpful man, nice idea!

Do you do any other side work besides dev? Does each dev only have responsibilities of feature work or are you responsible for different initiatives as well?

We used Kanban at my old team and I absolutely loved it. So much more efficient, less meetings, and still measured :D

[Dylan Anthony]

We really have two different teams where I work. The firmware team is focused primarily on embedded development (we’re an IoT company). They have a very different process which is more waterfall- esque due to the difficulty associated with testing and updating some of those devices.

My team is the software team, most of our time goes into improving the web applications but we also do all the operations/security, documentation, requirements gathering. Sometimes I’m working on physics problems with the firmware guys or statistics with data science or helping streamline manufacturing.

So really we’re each involved in a lot of different initiatives. But all the work goes into Kanban so it’s easy to visualize what needs to get done and how resources are being utilized.