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Project Timeline

Design Thinking

Design thinking activities help customers define an idea that they'd like to validate. This idea is often called an MVP - "Minimum Viable Product" (or "Minimum Valuable Product").

  • Cadence: Once, at the beginning of a project

Inception

Inceptions happen once after Design Thinking but before the squad starts writing code.

Typical agenda:

  1. Goals (both from a product and engagement perspective)
  2. Non-Goals
  3. Risks
  4. Personas
  5. User Stories
  6. Prioritization
  7. Retrospective
  • Cadence: Once, at the beginning of a project
  • Duration: Between 2 hours to 1 day
  • Participants: Product Owner, Developers, UX Designers, SMEs from the customer, maybe Architects
  • Purpose: The purpose of the Inception is to generate a list of 2-3 weeks worth of User Stories

Iterations

Iterations are 1 week long.

A standard iteration follows a schedule like this:

Iteration Planning Meeting (IPM)

Iteration Planning Meetings happen once a week, at the beginning of every iteration.

  • Cadence: Once per iteration, at the beginning
  • Duration: 30 minutes - 1 hour
  • Participants: The squad (Product Owner, Developers, UX Designer)
  • Purpose: Review the backlog and make sure everyone on the squad understands the stories coming up

Standup

Standup happens once per day at the beginning of the day

  • Cadence: Daily
  • Duration: 5 minutes or less
  • Participants: The squad (Product Owner, Developers, UX Designer)
  • Purpose: To determine who is pairing with whom on what story

Working the Backlog

Most of a developer's time will be spent working the backlog. This includes:

  • Pair Programming
  • Test-Driven Development
  • Devops (deploying stories to production)

NOTE: you may deploy each story to production as soon as it's accepted. There may be (and should be) several deployments within each iteration.

Retrospectives

Retrospectives happen once per iteration. General agenda:

  • 40% time gathering data (facts and opinions about the last iteration)
  • 10% time grouping / prioritizing themes (if necessary)
  • 50% time coming up with ways to address issues while keeping the good things
  • Cadence: Once per iteration, at the end
  • Duration: 30-60 minutes
  • Participants: The squad (Product Owner, Developers, UX Designer)
  • Purpose: To figure out how to do more of what works, and less of what doesn't. The primary way teams do continuous improvement.

Playbacks

Playbacks allow squads to show their work and engage in meaningful conversations with stakeholders about product direction, challenges, successes etc.

  • Cadence: Periodically
  • Duration: 30 minutes - 1 hour
  • Participants: A big meeting. The squad (Product Owner, Developers, UX Designer) plus stakeholders from the customer, architects etc...
  • Purpose: Keep stakeholders up-to-date on what's happening, get feedback and ideas from a bigger group of people

Show and Tell

Show and tell is a technical meeting of developers to share their code (following all confidentiality agreements) with each other.

  • Cadence: Periodically
  • Duration: Up to the participants
  • Participants: Developers from across the sales org
  • Purpose: Share technical tips, tricks, techniques so that everyone can continue to get better technically