Telegram -> Stride Migration Experience

~ maratkiniabulatov ~ 1 Comment

Recently I hosted Minsk Atlassian User Group, where I shared our experience on migrating to Stride and gave the analogy between Stride, and Russian word ‘Stradai’ (-> eng.: ‘Suffer’). I’ll explain the analogy later. Hence the ‘Napalm Death’ song ‘Suffer’ joke on the first slide 🙂

Given that a lot of people use Telegram as a corporate messenger, and given all of the telegram-blocking happening in Russia currently, it’s pretty relevant to write about alternatives. We at SkuVault migrated due to the need of user control, but migration experience is relevant to many other teams.

Atlassian launched Stride as a HipChat Cloud replacement (so we can call it hipchat 2.0). Main competition is Slack, which is currently de-facto corporate messaging standard, as we know. I’ll compare Stride to Telegram and Slack in areas they are strong.

Pros

Atlassian Ecosystem

Biggest point of Stride is that it connects to your atlassian ecosystem. Typically you got single account for Atlassian User, from which you can manage entirety of Atlassian Permissions. Now, Stride is added as an application to the very same account, and access / admin rights are easily managed from the very same place. If you want to have control over the users and the ecosystem that is locked to Atlassian (as we do) -> this is an ideal scenario.

admin_unified

In Telegram we had personal accounts, which you don’t have control of (sure you can create virtual / work phone numbers and link them to telegram to make it corporate-friendly, but that is kind of a crappy way to maintain users ecosystem).

In Slack – you have to pay more than $3/user and it’s a separate account management system.

Users Control

User Control means removing a person, when she no longer works at the company, visibility for messages in order for infosec to not be compromised.

Audio and Video Group Calls

It may not be something you’d count as a pro, but given that we previously used Telegram + Skype for calls (with hangouts as a fallback in case of skype outage), it’s nice to have same app doing everything.

Jira / Confluence Integration via bots

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Integration with Jira and Confluence (not out-of-the-box-though) gives you a glimpse of the ticket in the chatroom (ticket card that reflects priority, assigne and editable layout), ability to create tickets as a command to chat-bot (create new bug Fix spacing on signup page in SV project), bitbucket PR review poking, and a lot of neat other things you’d expect inside the Atlassian ecosystem).

bz_ruco5zorq8lnv3cnme3tpjvq

Basics

Mentions, citation, styles for text. NO HASHTAGS THOUGH – giant bummer!

Cons

suffer_stride.png

And here’s my analogy of ‘Stride’ to russian word ‘Suffer’: you can use Stride, but it’s still raw, and a lot of features you’d expect to be basic in messaging, are half-baked in Stride.

Video Calls

Let’s admit, that Slack sucks at group video calls as well. But Stride is much worse 🙂

stride_kianu.png

  • Issues include showing bad internet connection, when connection is good.
  • People may suddenly leave the call, although didn’t click on leaving or anything
  • Stride’s animations are smooth, so when it switches to another person, it fades in / fades out. And sometimes crashes during that animation!
  • Video lags a lot, sound doesn’t though
  • Video freezes a lot, and doesn’t resume until you restart the call
  • RAM consumption (400mb), CPU consumtion 70% on core i5 2014. This is a lot.
  • When you share the screen, and stride catches a glimpse of itself (stride window), it falls into the infinite glitch of Stride fractal windows.

Ok, done with the video calls!

Basics

  • No hashtags (sucks)
  • Sending messages is painful (it’s slow).
  • Sending messages with attachment is a torture (Stride waits until image is uploaded (slow), and only then allows you to click on send message (which is slow as well)
  • No forwarding between chatrooms -> leads to isolation of discussions to room-only.

Notifications

They are horrible (not Rocky-Horror-Show or Dr. Horrible way, and not even Troma-way. They are as bad as most coffee in US (ha-ha)). The sound of notification is bleak and unnoticable. You can’t change it, even if you rip apart the guts of app package and assemble it again 😦 That results in people not reacting on urgent messages.

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There is no mute for chat rooms, which results in information overload and renders the whole notifications system pointless.

There is no indication that your message was read by your counterpart. You don’t know whether to poke your colleague or he already read this.

Phone gets 2/3rds of all notifications. But when it does – mac app doesn’t show any of those! This is a typical failure, I’m writing this post on the train from Brest to Minsk where I ride to host AUG Minsk, and our team notified me with long message on my phone, but i see no new messages in my mac app. I have to restart it to get those messages.

Jira Bot

Although integration with jira bot is neat (hey, slack does that even better, actually), it crowds chat room’s vertical space like a giant worm that digs Jasinto in Gears of War 2. If you dump number of tickets to dicsuss in the chatroom, you can’t read any message because card previews will occupy the whole 2-3 screens of vertical space.

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JSON parsing

As per our admins, Stride doesn’t parse JSON on itself, so basically you have to parse and feed parsed JSON to the API yourself. Not the case with telegram.

Nutshell

Stride is not-horrible-beyond-anything, it’s ok. You can use it and adjust to it. Especially if you’re locked to Atlassian Ecosystem (and I love and use jira, even after the latest interface update). But if you’re already on slack – there’s no point, it will work better for now.

There are a lot of things to improve, and the guys at Stride work on making their product better. It took 5 years to telegram to become the best and neatest messaging platform, it took same number of years for Slack.

Parking Lot

References – Submitted Issues

Ufa AUG #1. Wrap Up

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So we’ve survived Ufa Atlassian User Group, the very first meetup, with 17 people visiting our office to hear about jira, confluence, bitbucket and other atlassian products 🙂

 

We’ve discussed how Jira helped us in reflecting SkuVault development processes, and how do we keep documentation on the feature in Confluence, until it’s released, and what info do we store there.

Panel consisted of Smena.io, modulbank, MEGI, and a couple other teams 🙂 Presentation is available in Russian via this link: UfaAUG_1.

Stay tuned at https://aug.atlassian.com/ufa/ for more events in Ufa 🙂

 

Agile Communication in Distributed Teams (with no overlapping hours)

~ maratkiniabulatov ~ 1 Comment

So as you know my speciality is distributed teams 🙂 This post is about what changes does the agile communication face (and scrum in particular), when it’s adjusted to the distributed teams. This is my experience, I don’t assume this is a silver bullet, but such approach works for me for the last 5 years and proved itself to be proficient.

Let’s divide communication by types:

  1. stragetic meetings (plannning, retrospective)
  2. daily huddles (e.g. daily standup in scrum)
  3. day-to-day clarifications.
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by Text I mean Instant Messaging

Let’s add another dimension: geographical distribution:

Collocated teams – everything’s perfectly fine for all three types of communication events. Teams, working in scrum, that are collocated face no issues with any of those.

Distributed teams with little difference in timezones, but still with overlapping hours. Great examples are US – Chile / Mexico. Netherlands / India.

  • Daily syncup can be handled with almost no pain, as well as planning and retrospective (if you incorporate scrum in your company).
  • Instantness of clarification on work tasks is lost (when overlapping hours end), however given that skype / hangouts / whatever you use is just a click away – no significant impediments are to be found.
  • No matter what you think about focused team, and that it processes everything faster due to unitedness, whenever team member is outside of her overlapping hours with the rest of the team – communication lag happens.

 

Distributed teams with no overlapping hours (8+ hours difference).

Approaches here are:

  • 3.1 Team liason. When someone from the team in one part of the world is having a meeting during his time off work, to sync up with other part of the team in different timezone. Usually, team liason is someone from product team, however there are different examples of who syncs up with dev team in the industry. It can be simply a representative from one part of the team that syncs up on the progress with the other part (just like in scrum of scrums)

 

  • 3.2 Timezone Compromise approach. Teams change their work schedule, to have a compromise in at least 1 overlapping hour, in order to sync properly. For example, start of working day for one part of the team in western hemisphere moved from 10am to 9am, and eastern hemisphere team changes their working day to start from 10am to 9am. Thus, you got at least 1-2 hours overlapping. Whoa, problem solved -> we can get back to bullet 2, on how teams with overlapping hours work together! But remember, everything depends on team configuration, whether the team is comfy with selected approach, and development tasks specifics.

 

  • 3.3 And finally, you can set up communication process in a way it’s comfortable for everyone in the distributed team. My personal beliefs is that redundant communication is always less efficient than on-demand-clear-bulleted-discussion, thus I’d prefer clear agenda and clarification when needed.

— 3.3.1 First of all, that means that people still are participating in retrospectives and planning sessions, cause those events happen once per 2-3 weeks (thus distraction or working off-time is tolerable). However, those meetings / scrum rituals are to be performed with clear goals, and well-prepared bullets. Try to not allow offtop conversations (when someone gets into topic not relevant to current discussion). Remember, team values personal time, and no team member should suffer from poorly planned meetings.

— 3.3.2 Second, it means that daily sync (or daily standup, if you follow scrum) can be done via text, at the end of team’s working day. In order to reach more visibility, developer can share a link to the branch, that he worked on. But main goal is to have an exceprt of what team member has done during the day, that is visible for everyone (e.g. special channel on updates in telegram). Some people also propose asynchronous video messages (Dave Snowden of cognitive edge shared this experience of his with me, referring to the times he worked at IBM) – you record video message for the team, and even share the screen, if you want some visual material on your work.

— 3.3.3 Third, clarificational communication (meaning day-to-day clarification communication type) is done on demand. Meeting for such batch of clarifications is done in a compromise time, so that noone’s felt left out). The good part of that is since you don’t have to get explanations on critical and extremely complex clarifications every day – you don’t need to torture your colleagues with evening / early morning calls each day. Usually, most of the impediments are resolved via instant messaging. Please keep in mind, that requirements standardisation is a key role in these clarifications, as properly structured requirements save a lot of time while developing a feature.

— 3.3.4 And fourth, but equally important, more standards and documenting. The more info necessary you prepare for your colleagues overseas, for the questions that may rise during your off-time, the less he will be stuck. Please use common sense in how much you need to prepare. When team gets to know each other, such planning becomes much easier. And finally, efficient process always means that person doesn’t get stuck 🙂

Finally, we’re getting to my favourite ever part!

Distributed teams with no overlapping hours + language barrier! I’ve been working with those for the last three year, and here are the additional steps to make it all work efficiently.

The three common baseline rules to follow are:

  1. Prepare meeting agenda prior to the meeting. I’m talking about writing down basic points, explanations, and maybe even branching when presenting solutions (depending on meeting complexity). It’s obvious, that people not fluent in english can’t properly communicate during the meeting – everything starts to require much more time, which isn’t efficient (and quite heavy, when it comes to hourly payrates 😉
  2. More documenting. You may say that Agile says “working software over comprehensive documentation”, however when dealing with distributed teams + no overlapping hours + language barrier, I can’t stress enough how much documentation means. There are key principles better to be described, as the team grows: communication standards (what type of communication is done via which tool, working time, speed of response), requirements acceptance, visual standards for documentation. All three principles affect how developer understands the task he’s supposed to work on. Requirements should have only one way of interpreting, should include clear pre-and-post-conditions; bugs are to be described in reproducible steps.
  3. And finally, it’s essential to have a bi-lingual person (team liason), who helps with english (he comes up with translation of complex bits, moderates the discussion). This person is better to be a developer or someone who gets the technical part well, as she often helps with syncing two development parts of the team. She may also add meeting notes on technical details agreed once meeting is over. That person most likely will sacrifice some of her time off, since hours don’t overlap.

At the end of the day, there are plenty examples across my experience, and blogs, how people manage to work with just on demand meetings, and create complex projects together. Those are git, atlassian and, among others – SkuVault.

Let me add an additional rule to common sense manifesto – process over redundancy. Greatly established process, understandable and rational for all parts of the team, makes it easy to track progress through transparency, keep team motivation high (for being productive) and time off undistracted.

References:

  1. http://www.disciplinedagiledelivery.com
  2. http://snowdolphin.com/blog/2009/2/16/adventures-in-distributed-agile.html
  3. http://agilemodeling.com/essays/communication.htm
  4. https://www.atlassian.com/blog/confluence/4-simple-collaboration-strategies-distributed-teams
  5. https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook
  6. https://www.atlassian.com/company/events/summit-europe/watch-sessions/2017/scale-extend/a-brave-journey-in-merge-waters-how-paysafe-consolidated-their-atlassian-tools
  7. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh771057.aspx
  8. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/cde9/6fed7d2e2591bc8f697814ab1f33e3a84160.pdf
  9. https://www.scrumalliance.org/community/articles/2013/july/managing-distributed-teams
  10. medium.com/@MentorMate/what-i-learned-managing-a-remote-agile-software-team-fd2db22e22b1
  11. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263398659MoonlightingScrumAnAgileMethodforDistributedTeamswithPart-TimeDevelopersWorkingduringNon-Overlapping_Hours
  12. https://www.agileconnection.com/article/five-agile-challenges-distributed-teams
  13. https://www.agilealliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Distributed-Agile-in-the-Enterprise-and-Virtual-Spaces-2012-08-16.pdf
  14. http://www.research.ibm.com/pdfs/scrum/Chapter6Pearson20090706.pdf
  15. https://www.thoughtworks.com/mingle/scaled-agile/2016/06/13/visualizing-time-zones.html
  16. http://reqtest.com/general/working-efficiently-with-distributed-teams/
  17. http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=109
  18. https://books.google.ru/books?id=jBsVrWbIhYUC&pg=PA112&lpg=PA112&dq=distributed+teams+agile+communication+no+overlapping+hours&source=bl&ots=0kdQw5RQo9&sig=SMVuHCrX0oH4dWq1KDn2lQ8-1fk&hl=ru&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwis5tDGvOHXAhXGQZoKHWzRCqE4ChDoAQhMMAU#v=onepage&q=distributed%20teams%20agile%20communication%20no%20overlapping%20hours&f=false

Ufa Atlassian User Group

~ maratkiniabulatov ~ Leave a comment

UPD: Rescheduled Jan. 30th -> to Feb. 6th.

Recently buddies from Moscow recommended me to join Atlassian User Group Leaders,to host Atlassian events in Ufa, so here I am (after an interview with Atassian)!

First ever-ever Atlassian User Group with special Atlassian swag will be happening January 30 2018, 7pm 🙂 Meetup related to all things atlassian and related! Follow the link and save the date 🙂 https://aug.atlassian.com/events/details/atlassian-ufa-presents-ufa-atlassian-user-group-1#/

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  • # I’ll be talking about how we adapted our development workflow in JIRA
  • # Documentation lifecycle in confluence at SkuVault

More topics to come, from our local Atlassian Users 🙂

Ufa IT Management Meetup #4

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This time it was all about requirements. And we hosted the event at our cozy SkuVault office:

IMG_1550

  • Eliciting and preparing requirements from gathering data till development:
    • Oleg Gumerov (PO at SMENA – solutions provider for a big delivery service) shared his experience on how they do it in SMENA.io;
    • Nur Ibragimov (Head Analyst at modulbank) shared their way of processing requirements;
    • Us (me and Ksenia – also PM/ BA at SkuVault) shared how we do it in SkuVault, as well as how we used to work on requirements at Storia.me back in the days.
  • Formalizing and Structuring the requirements, by our own Ksenia of SkuVault
  • Tracking changes in Requirements by Ksenia (lightning talk)
  • Tracking time and Estimations by me (lightning talk)
  • Documentation Lifecycle when developing a feature (by me)

And that was my first-time experience of stitching video and audio 🙂

Meetup is in Russian, links are: VK / Meetup / Telegram Channel

Ufa IT Management Meetup (24.10.17)

~ maratkiniabulatov ~ Leave a comment

2 weeks after we had the actual meetup, here’s the follow-up post 🙂

Topics this time:

  • Keynote by me on cynefin and how it fits our company projects. Had some discussion & arguing on applicacy of cynefin when it comes to rough development times, migrations, firefighting-based development. Overall, model was introduced, and the fact-and-experience-based arguments are always the best. Cause we all keep it harsh, true and ironic, when it comes to sharing something you’ve been stuffing bumps on!
  • Afterwards beer-session was a 3-hour-rant on headhunting of employees by Moscow, Saint-Petersburgh, Europe and States, and that Ufa developers became much more audacious, over the past crisis-driven years (given that there was no crisis in Moscow and the rest of the world). Seems like the raises are imminent, if you want to keep the developer. Headhunting becomes more brutal and sneaky at the same time!
  • Yet another topic was keeping the valuable professional, when he reaches the limites of intra-company growth, and what is best to offer in those cases.

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Overall, meetup gathers momentum and creates a community. We already got bigger guys from the enterprisey-yet-more-or-less-tolerable-sector, few startups on mobile/IoT/PaaS, Banking, Digital 🙂

our links are: VK / Meetup / Telegram Channel

Agile Turkey Summit 2017

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Me & my colleague basically decided to attend Agile Greece and Agile Turkey, and then exchange opinions and knowledge gathered there. Big advantage of my trip was Dave Snowden’s keynote, whom I wanted to catch after the speech and bore to death with silly questions 🙂

Agile Turkey Itself

The conference (1-day conference, october 19th) kind of frustrated me, as 2/3rds of speeches were in Turkish, so I had to ditch my plan to attend certain events, and half of the time was roaming around the conference floor.

2017-10-30 11-37-36

Dear people who stand behind this huge event, Agile Turkey team, please make a note next to the speech, that it may be in Turkish next time 🙂 That would be awesome!

The awesome part of that was that English-speaking crowd (mostly invited speakers) were roaming around the vortex (as Kurt Bittner joked) as well. Noone occupied their attention (possibly because of the language barrier), so I’ve turned that into 2-3-hour-long interrogations!

The Bag ‘Shift Happens. Be Agile’ has a nice slogan, but poor quality 🙂 Lots of spam from sponsors and small notebook with the pen. Felt like I’m on my local UfaDevConf conference.

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Snowden’s Keynote

I’m so glad that I’ve attended to one of Dave Snowden’s speeches! He’s an amazing guy, I love his approach to not treat metholodogies and frameworks as silver bullets, I love how he merges anthropology with IT – and I share this approach wholeheatedly (given my specialization in Applied IT in Psychology).

Keynote was called COMPLEXITY, CULTURE AND CONFUSION. Snowden described cynefin model, which I find as an universally applicable framework for sense-making. My experience with cynefin emerged when we were trying to find an already-existing model of describing various projects we had at SkuVault with Ksenia. And guess what: it fits and describes how we firefight, develop new features, research/migrate/stuff bumps as a sequence of cause-effect perfectly (and I’ll write about that soon).

Key points:

  • Perception over mindset: I’m so agreeing with him, that mindset cannot be changed after it’s declared to be agile: you start with slow process and transparency improvement – and over the time the team becomes more agile. And only then the inner understanding of the business agility is fulfilled.
  • As soon as the company declares it’s now agile – it’s definitely the opposite (which is derived from the first bullet).
  • There’s a thin line between simple and chaotic systems in cynefin, and you may even not see if you’re already in chaos: it may be calm on the outside.
  • Work on company’s perception among the clients. Clients remember all past negative events you had. Interview the clients / market, and make sure you address the question: ‘what can we do so that clients don’t say this the next time’, instead of justificating your actions.
  • Company’s culture is to be inherited. There should be a knowledge sharing, when the creators transmit their values to the others, share both good and bad experiences over the course of the work.
  • Waterfall is not bad (thank god finally more and more people start telling that).
  • And yes, finally, SAFe and NEXUS stop being dynamic, when they scale up! And that’s the disconnection from the original Agility idea!

The latter part of me interacting torturing Snowden with questions on remote distributed teams with huge timezone difference, processes and estimations was indeed very satisfying! Lesson learned from almost every speaker I had time to chat with: SkuVault’s case is unique and you empirically find your own path of comfortable pace, workflow and communication.

2017-10-19 11.11.58

Mr. Snowden also shed some light on asynchronous conference calls they had back at IBM, which seems like a very interesting idea to try now.

Kurt Bittner of Scrum.org

Kurt Bittner was talking about ‘5 THINGS YOU NEED TO DO TO SCALE YOUR AGILE ADOPTION’ (http://www.summit.agileturkey.org/session/5-things-you-need-to-do-to-scale-your-agile-adoption/).

 

 

Later on, I sneaked out to him while he was listening to some old Van Halen stuff, and started to ask tricky questions:

  • How does Scrum work, when the team is distributed, when there’s a language barrier, when timezone difference is 9-10 hours? (>> scrum works, but that depends on how comfortable the team is overall with scrum and everyone’s got own approach, mixed with constraints that every organization has).
  • We recently worked on migrating a huge chunk of SkuVault to a new architecture and it was chaotic, is Scrum a good way to handle such? (>> R&D projects may work with Scrum pretty good, however in our case there’s no clear answer because using micro-sprints for 1 day and have a whole retro for that seems obscurely inefficient and redundant).
  • Politics (eww)… Skiing & Hiking in Colorado and generally in the world.. Does iPad Pro 12″ really allow you to do general work without bringing your laptop (for mail and notes yup).
  • Estimates – what does he think of them, do we even need them fully in scrum? (>> Kurt is not a fan of estimates. If you got a timerange – better give it (doing this myself all the time), and estimate is really needed only in times when you have to understand project phase length).
  • Overcertification, and is there really a problem with Scrum Master certification and poor performance of fresh certified practitioners, which devalues overall CSM / PSM badges? (>> gosh, this is a painful topic to discuss with scrum.org rep, right? 🙂 So the consensus was that SCM certification really only shows that you know the basics, it doesn’t tell anyone about your experience on the battlefield and definitely not something to rely on when forcing scrum 😉 So in a way, yes, certified people quality in scrum and process building may devalue certification perks… kinda…)

Kurt was not just helpful, he’s been my savior in the middle of turkish-only-speaking crowd 🙂 I thank him greatly for expanded answers, references to his experience and knowledge sharing!

Other interesting speeches and people

Simon Orell told an interesting story on his experience in applying Scrum (although modified) in building gas turbines (!) in Canada (BILLION DOLLAR AGILE: APPLYING SCRUM VALUES AND PRINCIPLES TO LARGE CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS, ) – COOL!

Scott Ambler told about pragmatic way of looking at company transformation in his ‘THE DISCIPLINED AGILE ENTERPRISE‘ speech.

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Jira: removing transition from current status to itself (if All -> transition is turned on)

~ maratkiniabulatov ~ Leave a comment

Small and duct-tapey resolution for the time, when you have an All -> [statusName] JIRA workflow transition.

By default, it results in the following: Default Ticket Screen shows transition from current to current status, among others. So e.g., you have an In Progress ticket, you have the transition to the very same In Progress. To avoid that, use simple conditioning for the transition:

  1. Go to transition Conditions
  2. Click Add New
  3. Select ‘Value Field’ from the given list
  4. Select logical operator ‘doesn’t equal’ / ‘!=’
  5. And put a value in it (name of current status, and the value to be handled as string)
example_ticket
Start Working is the transition name to the “In Progress” status
all_transition
This is how it looks in Workflow

2017-10-06 15-52-01

2017-10-06 15-53-08

This works in the following way:

Perform Transition (if (Status doesn't equal string('currentStatus') condition is met).

@AtlassianTeam! A good UX would be something like a checkbox, checked by default, and labelled “Don’t show transition option to same status”.

RU: Открываем дочку американского юридического лица в России

~ maratkiniabulatov ~ 1 Comment

This post is available in English.

И делаем это без необходимости прилета в РФ американского гендира.

Последние полгода я набивал шишки, ходя по инстанциям, собственно, поделюсь опытом 🙂 Задача: открыть 100-процентную дочку в России (материнская SkuVault.com находится в Луисвилле, Кентукки). Наш случай несколько уникален: CEO не мог посетить РФ, так что заверять и пересылать идентификационные документы приходилось туда-сюда меж двух контитентов.

На практике, все делается достаточно просто. Всего-то придется столкнуться с бюрократической машиной Mother Russia (которая за последние годы стала неимоверно удобнее), проблемами с межведомственной коммуникацией, ну да беготней с документами.

Continue reading →

Workflow for the Requirements in the Distributed team

~ maratkiniabulatov ~ 1 Comment

This is basically the anatomy of a distributed team, working on requirements. Key point here is that this is the process working for us, in current configuration, and it’s effective.

Disclaimer: Every organization is different: from internal structure to how it communicates with the outer world. So no workflow is a silver bullet.

Disclaimer 2: SkuVault is an ever-improving team of ~50 people, distributed across 10 timezones, 2 different versions, and serving loyal clients worldwide 24/7. Learn more about Communication in distributed teams: Messenger & Rules, or Why we ditched Scrum, in favor of Kanban in JIRA

In order to let developer work as productive as possible, management should ensure the following bits related to her work are tackled:

  • Requirements Fallback – whom to ask
  • Issue Description & Decomposition
  • No interruption

We moved closer to ‘no interruption’ bullet by creating on call teams, that are reacting to whatever urgent issues arise. (hållo to Kniberg’s Scrum from the Trenches 2nd edition – our own way of ‘firefighting teams’!).

However, there was no requirements preparation workflow a while back, so as the features grew more complex, more dependencies were discovered, we faced the inevitable given our product size: scope creeps, miscommunication, conclicting scenarios and inconsistency.

In order to bring all departments that were related to requirements eliciting and approval, we’ve created Product Management flow, which had to be highway to hell to better requirements.

Product Management Flow

We aimed to tackle the following areas by creating a formalized workflow:

  • Easy to understand sequence of steps
  • Each step has an accountable person, visible to all participants
  • Workflow encourages Argumentation and Discussion -> no misinterpreted suggestions and details are hashed out collaboratively
  • Each step ensures higher quality requirements, by providing criterias to be met on the output

Workflow consists of sequential steps: New Issue -> Discovery -> Sign Off -> Analysis

IMG_20170822_125022 (1)
mind the typical bad estimation of space on the left 😛

New Issue

Ticket is created by trigger from multiple sources (marketing, services, tech, customer support forums,..). During this state, the ticket is relatively empty, providing only the request and source of the request.

Transition: In order to move the issue to the next stage, Product Owner reviews whether we’ll ever do this feature. If no – he closes it. Yes, sometime – he moves the ticket to Backlog. Yes, near-future – he moves it to Preliminary Analysis.

Preliminary Analysis (Discovery)

Step Goal: Product owner should outline Feature goal (what we need to achieve, benefits for our company and customers); describe basic business process (general 1-2 sentenses on how it works among the warehouse, since we’re a warehousing solutions company); and add that to wiki-page for that feature.

Example: 

Brief feature description

Shipments are a way to track sale items that have been shipped to the customer of the Sale. A Shipment exists in SkuVault once a Tracking Number is assigned by the carrier.We want to provide an ability to connect and save tracking numbers, so that our users can have more visibility and editing right inside the app.

What do we want to achieve
Allow people that use shipping providers that don’t integrate with marketplaces as SkuVault
How it works on the warehouse

Goal: Allow clients to label products with tracking number, and see shipments in relation to Sale they are attached to

  1. Picker gets to the QC table
  2. QC performing person takes the product, QCs it and labels the product with shipping label and tracking number
  3. The tracking number is added to the system and can be visible in relation to the sale
  4. User tracks the product via tracking number

Stakeholder Sign Off

Since there’s quite a stream of tickets, we let Stakeholders approve bunch of tickets at a time. Someone might say ‘Hey, isn’t that Product Owner’s responsibility, to approve?’. Well, first of all our product is big and includes different areas and domains: services, marketing, tech, operations – all having their own pursuits respectively, even if we’re moving towards the same goal.

Step Goal: approve the idea, general process and timeline for the feature to be developed.

The next step would be to gather related parties and start..

Analysis

Analysis is biggest, most collaborative and complex part of the workflow. It involves:

[Business Analysts (creating User Stories)] => [collaborative efforts between BAs / UX / Developers (Wireframing)] <=> [BA / Developers (requirements adjustments, brainstorms, decomposition and clarification)].

Outcome: clear and atomized User Stories with Backend Subtasks with estimates, that give you ability to grasp and plan the feature for development. By you I mean us, Project Managers 🙂

Example: User Story – formalized and easy to grasp description, representing user activity and ability to interact with it.

Precondition: user is on Sale Info page

  1. Before the user clicks a Shipment Tab in the Sale Info page, the hint at the top says “Click a Shipment for Detailed Information”
  2. When the user clicks a Shipment line they see complete Shipment details at the top.
    1. list of fields for Shipments can be seen in Shipments – Plans / Technical Requirements
  3. They can click a button for Shipped Items or Total Cost to see detail for the items.
  4. If a Tracking URL exists for a shipment the user can click it to open the URL in a new tab.
    1. After new tab opens, user is navigated to shipping carrier website with tracking url info
    2. If there is not a tracking url user simple sees “Unknown” instead of the url.
  5. If a Label (ie: PDF) is present, the user can view it in a new tab, or download it by clicking on ‘Download’ button

Post-condition: user is able to see related Shipments info

We got strict rules for creating user stories, technical tasks, support requests and bug reports. This ensures same standards across out task-tracking system (Jira, and properly used Kanban magic) for different issue types, and allows to interpret requirements with the single possible way (which is extremely helpful :).

kanban_board

Nutshell

Right, so in a nutshell, this dramatically increased our requirements quality, and gave us ability to start analysing scope creeps properly, visibility for similar projects and better prognosis. There are things to improve, such as redundancy removal from the requirements, optimizing time spent on the workflow, better communication when estimating client requests – we’re getting closed to that!

Smaller IDEAS tickets - Page 1

one more thing: “oh, author, your flow is redundant for smaller features!”. You’re right, just remove sign off phase and ease analysis to accomodate simple story description  for that feature / improvement ;).