Our Process

The team is organized using an agile process framework called Kanban. Requirements are elicited from our sponsor, and transcribed into issues on GitHub. These issues are then triaged with a size estimate and categories of work, and left in the To-Do backlog column.

We use a GitHub project to host our Kanban Board.

When a team member starts exploring the nuances of implementing a given work item in To-Do, they self-assign the card, and move it manually to the Doing column. Once work is ready for review, the team member in question opens a Pull Request with their code changes, tags the issue number in the description so it’s easy to track from requirements to issue cards to code, and moves their card from Doing to In-Review. Once a team member has signed off on the changes, the original team member is free to merge their code, and once they do so, move the corresponding card from In-Review to Done.

Every week at our Tuesday sponsor meeting, we go over a four-up chart in which we detail any tasks from the backlog we’ve assigned ourselves, what progress we’ve made on it, and any blockers to completing work. At this meeting, our sponsor has the opportunity to indicate work prioritization, though we often manage this ourselves. At regular weekly meetings, we may also engage in quick design sessions, update our living documents, and review the metrics we collect about ourselves.