Getting better at getting better. Our goal for 2015 is to make our process more transparent, agile, and open to community contributors. We're continually evolving and documenting how we do that. (And we've changed a bunch of our tools and process recently, so we frequently trip and break things.)
Here's a high-level summary, with links to more detail on each:
How we plan
- Working open -- We're committed to transparency, agility and community participation.
- Planning -- we plan yearly and quarterly. Then translate our quarterly goals into two-week sprints or "Heartbeats," to that we can learn and adapt as we go.
- Heartbeats -- each two-week Heartbeat has a beginning, middle and end. We ritualize and seek to continually improve it.
How we work
- Projects -- each Heartbeat focuses on a small number of key projects. Each of those projects has a Planning Ticket associated with it. To ensure we're clear on the high-level goals, roles, and status.
- Roles -- each project has a Driver (the project manager and taskmaster), Decision-Maker (the business owner who sets the goal and decided whether the work serves it), Design Lead (to quarterback any design work required), Development Lead (for any engineering work required), and Quality Verifier (responsible for signing off and making sure it's good enough to ship.)
- Priorities -- every projects gets assigned a label as "P1" (must do) or "P2" (try to do -- but the world won't explode if it doesn't get completed in this Heartbeat.)
How we ship
- Kick-offs -- every projects starts with a Kick-Off Meeting. All the stakeholders get together to ensure everyone's on the same page and that individual tasks are clear and ticketed.
- Sign-offs -- Once the work is done, we use a sign-off checklist to make sure it's properly tested and ready for human consumption.
- Demos -- at the end of each Heartbeat, all the P1s demo to show what they got done.