The ERM Development team is a remote and widely distributed development team, with members available for different hours and with variable working patterns.
As a result, we use specific methods to aid communication and to help focus our delivery effort:
- Slack for daily asynchronous progress updates
- Jira for contextually relevant issue queries and clarifications (supported by Slack calls and conversation threads)
- Video call for weekly team planning and review
Development team leads are responsible for making sure that update reminders, Jira issues and team meetings are in place to support good communication.
All team members are responsible for providing timely updates and contributions in the relevant formats.
Daily Slack Updates
Aims:
- to get a clear picture of what team members are working on, and with as minimal overhead as possible.
- identify specific blockers or dependencies for the allocated work.
- free up time for more effective weekly team calls.
Led by: Scrum Master via Slack reminders
Contributors: all ERM delivery team members
Personalised Update Threads
- Daily updates are handled asynchronously in the #erm-developers channel.
- Each member of the development team has their own daily reminders.
- Provide your update by starting a threaded reply to your own reminder.
- Answer each part of the reminder prompt.
- Mention (@ ) others as needed if you need input, help or collaboration.
- If you are mentioned by a team mate, please acknowledge / reply within their update thread. Break out a call or separate thread as needed.
Update Detail
- Goals (and progress) should include the Jira reference to issues you are (or have been) actively working on for the time day in question.
- This should be at the appropriate story, scenario or dev sub-task, rather than feature level (ie, no UXPROD issues)
- If a piece of work is going to span multiple days, be specific about the dev tasks and/or scenarios you're working on (or have delivered) for the day in question.
- If you expect (or are experiencing) a challenge, obstable or blocker,
- flesh out details on the relevant Jira issue to keep full context.
- summarise and link to the issue in the Slack update.
- Do use bullet lists, to make your update easier to read (
CTRL/CMD+SHIFT+8
in Slack). - Do include ERM work that isn't in Jira.
- Do include non-ERM issues you are working on while allocated to ERM.
- Don't include non-ERM issues you are progressing when you're not allocated to work on ERM.
Reminder Schedule
- Reminders are scheduled for each weekday, but please respond according to your work patterns
- eg, "previous day" and "next day" are the corresponding days you are next available for ERM.
- Update points will be scheduled for morning, afternoon and end-of-day.
- If you're finishing before the stand-down reminder time, please use the templates below
Templates
Morning Standup Template (09:00)
Good morning @Jag Goraya! Tell us (1) what you plan to complete
and (2) your availability
today.
Afternoon Check-in Template (13:00)
Pause for breath and check-in @Jag Goraya!
(1) Are you still on track
for today's goals?
(2) If not, what are the challenges and what help
do you need from whom (@ mention as required)?
End of Day Stand Down Template (16:30)
Ready to stand down @Jag Goraya? Tell us (1) what you completed
(2) what's carried over
and to start next
, as well as (3) your next availability
.
Weekly Team Calls
Requires Update
This section needs to be updated to reflect a revised team call pattern that has been introduced to align better with 2-week sprint cycle.
Aims: focus on development workflow, delivery context and team deliverables
Led by: Scrum Master
Contributors: all ERM delivery team members
Currently the team calls are on Wednesday afternoons, following usergroup calls. Timing may change to better align with FOLIO sprint cadence and review.
Call Scope
- Weekly dev team calls will focus less on progress updates, and more on delivery workflow (including sprint planning and software review):
- allocating user stories that are ready for development (Scrum Master / Lead Dev)
- clarifying story outcomes and constraints (Product Owner / UX Lead)
- demo of WIP & shipped development (Developers)
- Detailed technical task planning for allocated stories will happen outside of team calls (led by Lead Dev).
- Backlog grooming (owned by Product Owner), story estimating (Scrum Master / Lead Dev)
and sprint retrospectives (Scrum Master)will also happen outside of team calls.
Standing Agenda
- Introductions
- Attendee / Apologies
- Upcoming Availability
- Current Sprint Review (Scrum Master / Team Members)
- Deliverable Status
- Internal Demo
- Next Sprint
- Sprint Focus / Backlog Priorities (Scrum Master)
- Story Assignment
- Story Allocations (Scrum Master / Lead Dev)
- Requirement Clarifications (Developers / Product Owner / UX Lead)
- Technical Followups (Dev / Lead Dev)
- After Next Sprint (Product Owner)
- Usergroup Update
- Backlog Grooming Focus
- Other Matters (Scrum Master)
- AOB (All)
JIRA Updates & Slack 'Card Conversations'
Aims: capture issues and decisions relating to user stories or features in the right delivery context
Led by / Contributors: all ERM delivery team members, as needed
- Jira should be used to capture questions and clarifications for the issue in context.
- If a conversation relating to an issue happens in Slack, summarise or copy any resolution or outstanding queries into Jira.
- Use the #erm-developers Slack channel for project calls
- Give calls a meaningful name (eg, relating to the issue)
- Use threaded conversations in Slack to avoid the timeline disappearing too quickly and keep context.