Ways of Working
This document serves as our collaborative play-book, providing clear guidelines and standardised processes for ‘how we work’ together. It ensures consistency, clarity, and efficiency in our daily tasks, fostering a harmonious team culture. By referring to this document, we align ourselves toward common goals, resolve conflicts, and adapt to changing needs. It’s not just a set of rules; it’s a tool for continuous improvement, helping us evolve and excel as a team.
Statuses:
- ✅ Accepted
- 🧪 Experimenting
- 💡 New idea (waiting to be discussed by the team)
Delivery
✅ We Update Stories With Progress
To keep everyone in the loop and maintain transparency, updating your assigned stories’ status regularly is crucial. Whether it’s a small task or a significant milestone, updating the stories with your progress ensures everyone knows where we stand and how we’re moving forward.
✅ We Use 2-Week Sprints
2-week sprints have been accepted as a reasonable time frame to balance the need for the team to deliver complex work items, and the need to include reflective practices such as demos, retrospectives, and sprint planning frequently.
💡 Implementing Firebreak Sprints
We embrace Firebreak Sprints as a vital component of our engineering process, dedicating structured breaks from our regular sprint cycles to activities that significantly contribute to our technical health, innovation, and team well-being.
For inspiration and guidance, we look to the GOV.UK team’s approach to Firebreak Sprints. Their experiences underscore the value of such initiatives in promoting technical excellence and team well-being. For more information, please see our documentation describing Firebreak Sprints.
Ceremonies
✅ Backlog Refinement
These sessions enable us to review, prioritise, and adapt our tasks. By fine-tuning upcoming work items, we ensure clarity and focus. Backlog refinement promotes effective planning, enabling us to address potential challenges in advance. These sessions foster collaboration, empowering team members to contribute ideas and clarify doubts. Through these targeted discussions, we maintain a well-organized backlog. Engaging in backlog refinement enhances our readiness for future sprints.
✅ Demos
These sessions ensure transparency, collaboration, and rapid improvement. By showcasing completed work to stakeholders, we align everyone with our progress and gather immediate feedback. This process fosters team pride and accountability. Additionally, demos empower stakeholders with direct insights, enhancing their engagement. Through these efficient sessions, we celebrate successes, pinpoint areas for growth, and pivot effectively for upcoming sprints, ensuring our continuous development and team cohesion.
✅ Milestone Planning
To enable effective delivery of larger, more complex problems - we dedicate a session to looking ahead and planning what we should work on next and detail the work required.
As priority, we ensure current milestones that are being worked on contain the work items required to complete the milestone.
After, we look forward to the next milestones the team could start planning.
These sessions help foster a collaborative culture, ensuring all team members can have their voices heard early in the planning stages.
✅ Retrospectives
Retrospectives are pivotal in our team’s evolution. These condensed and insightful sessions provide a dedicated space for reflection, learning, and growth. By analysing our recent sprint, we identify successes and challenges, enabling us to celebrate achievements and address obstacles. Retrospectives foster open communication, empowering team members to share ideas for improvement candidly. Through these focused discussions, we refine our strategies, enhance collaboration, and fortify our team dynamics. Embracing retrospectives ensures our continuous adaptation and drives us toward excellence in every sprint.
✅ Risk Register Review
These sessions provide a clear understanding of our current risks and serve as a platform to discuss both existing and potential new challenges. By openly addressing these risks, we foster a team-wide awareness and encourage proactive problem-solving. These discussions empower us to develop effective strategies, enhancing our preparedness and adaptability. Our focus is not just on identifying problems but on finding collective solutions. Engaging in these reviews ensures that our team is well-equipped to navigate uncertainties and confidently make informed decisions.
For further details on the ceremony, visit the Risk Review Meeting Process
✅ Sprint Planning
In these focused sessions, we outline our goals and tasks for the upcoming sprint. By defining clear objectives, we foster team alignment and understanding. Sprint planning ensures that every team member comprehends their roles and responsibilities, promoting accountability. These sessions allow us to optimize our efforts toward shared objectives. By engaging in sprint planning, we enhance collaboration, refine our strategies, and set the stage for a successful sprint. This meticulous planning guarantees our team’s cohesion, enabling us to deliver high-quality work consistently.
✅ Daily Stand-Up Meetings
Our team holds daily stand-up meetings in the morning to improve communication and collaboration. This consistent timing aligns everyone, allowing for timely updates and obstacle resolution. Morning meetings enable efficient daily planning, ensuring tasks are in sync with team objectives. This proactive approach enhances productivity and teamwork, making our Agile process more effective.
✅ If Unable to Attend Stand-Up, Post an Update in the Slack Channel
Post a brief update in the designated Slack channel if you cannot attend stand-up. Sharing your progress, impediments, and any help you need keeps the team informed and ensures we can support each other effectively, even when we’re not physically present.
✅ We Walk the Board at Stand-Ups
At our Stand-Up meetings, it’s essential that everyone actively participates. We walk the board together, discussing the tasks and their statuses. This shared understanding helps us identify bottlenecks, dependencies, and progress made. By default, you should be ready to share your updates and actively engage in the discussion.
✅ Stand-Down Reflections for Continuous Growth
As we wrap up the day, let’s reflect and share a moment in our Stand-Down thread. Post updates to celebrate progress, voice frustrations to seek support, and highlight wins to spread joy. This transparency fosters teamwork and growth.
- Updates: Please make sure to note what you’ve accomplished.
- Frustrations: Share any obstacles - remember, it’s us against the problem.
- Wins: Let’s cheer for our victories, big or small.
Stay constructive and kind.
✅ Use Google Meet For Ceremonies
To ensure we have the stability and functionality required to run ceremonies effectively, we use Google Meets for Ceremonies by default. Google Meet is familiar to the team and has been proven to provide most of the functionality required to run meetings effectively, such as:
- Sharing individual tabs/apps instead of the entire screen
- Quick reactions for instant feedback
- Easy to use hand-up facility for a better flow of conversation of topics
- Quality video streaming capabilities so team members can have cameras enabled
✅ Use Slack Huddles For Stand-Up
To increase the visibility of our daily updates, we use Slack Huddles to host stand-ups. Slack allows quick and efficient stand-ups in a public space where our conversation can be saved and referenced later.
✅ Rotational Stand-Up Meeting Hosts
We should use a rotational approach to hosting our daily stand-up meetings to enhance engagement and shared responsibility. Each team member will take turns facilitating the stand-up, ensuring diverse perspectives and a deeper sense of involvement. This approach aims to foster a more inclusive and dynamic team environment.
The host will walk the team through the board, ensuring each member has a chance to update on their progress and raise any blockers.
Team members are encouraged to support the host, fostering a collaborative atmosphere.
🧪 Ways of Engineering
As an experimental practice, we will introduce a “Ways of Engineering Ceremony” to our routine. This ceremony is dedicated to discussing and reviewing our team’s engineering practices in a structured yet open forum. The goal is to foster continuous dialogue on improvements, innovations, and adjustments needed within our engineering domain. This initiative will allow us to collectively assess the effectiveness of our current practices, explore new methodologies, and decide on the adoption of experimental practices on a regular basis. Participation and input from every team member are crucial for making this ceremony a valuable asset in our continuous improvement journey.
General
✅ Team Socialisation
We aim to partake in team social days at least every two months to ensure a healthy work-life balance and encourage camaraderie through activities outside. These days are essential for us to step back from work and strengthen our team dynamics through shared, informal experiences. We also aim to include virtual activities where we can help break up some of the more ceremony-intense days.
For anyone wondering, Sam is currently the darts champion.[citation needed]
Tools
✅ We use GitHub Projects For Project Workflow Visualisation
To increase the visibility of our work in progress and to keep track/plan future work effectively, we use GitHub projects.
GitHub Projects is a simple-to-use project management tool that integrates seamlessly with our code repositories, which are already hosted in GitHub.
It allows to easily add custom fields and metrics to keep track of project management related meta-data for work items, and create specialised views to optimise our ceremonies.
Our board can be found here
Adding/Adjusting Ways of Working
Adding or adjusting our Ways of Working is a collaborative process. If you have a suggestion or think something needs to change, raise a Pull Request to update the document! Feel free to discuss the change in our Slack channel or during our Stand-Up. At latest, we’ll discuss any changes during our Retrospective meetings. We value continuous improvement, so your input is essential in shaping how we work together as a team.
Experimental Ways of Working
As an innovative team, we’re always exploring new methods to enhance our productivity and collaboration.
Remember, experiments are opportunities for us to learn and grow together. Your feedback and active participation are vital in making these experiments successful.