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Development Process

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good

— Voltaire

Kanban Boards

We maintain a (private) JIRA with two Kanban boards:

  • Daily Stand-up, reviewed daily.

  • Backlog, groomed weekly.

Periodically stories are moved from the "Backlog" board to the "Daily Standup" board.

User stories have value (epics)

All stories should provide some sort of value to the business; thus their value can be compared and the stories prioritized accordingly. The corollary is that all stories must be meaningful to the business in one way or another. Even a seemingly technical story (such as improving performance) should be expressed in terms the value it delivers to the business.

Many (perhaps most) stories will be associated with an epic, in which case it is the epic that needs to have a meaning to the business (even if not every story within does). We use the ECP Jira project for all epics.

Projects vs Products

We use Jira Projects to keep track of software products:

  • EST = Estatio

  • ELI = ContactApp

  • ECPCRM = Kiosk

(As noted above) the ECP Jira project is used to keep track of our epics. The stories within this epic could be taken from any of the different products.

Warning

TODO: we need to create additional Jira projects for Nuxeo, Docker etc. etc.

Story lifecycle

(As its name suggests) the "Daily Stand-up" board is reviewed daily, and helps the team synchronize on work. For example, a story may need reviewing, in which case this can be flagged, or it may be blocked, awaiting input. The board itself defines the following columns:

  • Next - longer-term stories (arrived from the Backlog)

  • Current - work ready to put into play

  • Blocked - awaiting input, eg from the business or external vendors

  • In Progress - actively being worked on

  • In Review - completed, waiting for review by some other team member

  • Done - completed and merged into master, awaiting deployment.

We from right to left, looking to move stuff across the board.

If a new story is created in JIRA, then our workflow adds it to the "Current" column. This brings it to the attention of all for the next days stand-up (where it will either remain where it is, or perhaps be moved to the "Next" column or even the Backlog board if lower priority).

We aim to keep master deployable to production at all times. For all but the most trivial stories we use git branches and pull requests to allow stories to be reviewed by others in the team.

Overall then, the process is:

  • identify the story, pull from "Current" column of "Daily Stand-up" board to "In progress", and assign to yourself.

    Warning

    It’s bad form to push work onto developers; instead developers should pull work onto themselves.

  • Identify what needs to be done.

    Use the definition of done checklist as a starting point.

  • Create and work in a new git branch

  • If blocked on a story, and no-one is available to immediately assist, then move the story to "Blocked" and find some other work

  • When done, push the branch and raise a PR. Move the story to "For Review". Ensure that any DB scripts that might need to be applied are clearly identified. Find someone to review the changes.

  • With another developer, review the changes in the PR. If both happy, then merge the PR and push to master.