Bulldozing Agile Methodology
At Tuenti, each team manages one or more of the products that make up our application. They are therefore responsible for their future, which makes it important for the Product Manager and the Tech Lead to share a common vision of their long and short-term roadmap.
When you have a long-term vision, it is necessary to constantly review your progress, so we organize the year into four quarters in which each team undertakes to carry out a series of projects which must combine the company’s objectives with product development.
From there, each team organizes itself as it wishes and is free to use any methodology and tailor it to its way of working. Typically, the most commonly used methodologies are Kanban, Scrum or a mixture of both, Scrumban. Each team takes the aspects of the methodologies that work best for them, as they are only frameworks.
In my team, Voice, we are in charge of developing the VozDigital product, our VoIP service. We are responsible both for developing it and for managing the infrastructure that supports it. For this reason, we use Kanban. This enables us to manage the incidents that arise, typical of a product deployed in four countries (Spain, Argentina, Peru and Ecuador), and the development of product improvements, i.e., our quarterly objectives. The projects we tend to undertake are not usually very large, with a duration of one to two months.
Having a well-organized backlog is key. A good backlog should not have more than 150 elements, between user stories and bugs. It becomes difficult to handle a larger backlog, as you need to know it very well. A good way to achieve this is to create EPICs to represent each quarterly objective. This helps to properly prioritize the tasks, since the user stories from the first objective, first EPIC, should be at the beginning of the backlog.
Similarly, each team has its own rituals. Most teams usually hold a “weekly” meeting at the start of the week. This meeting is very useful to review the status of the projects, for the Product Manager to update the team on the status of the products and their new ideas and for the Tech Lead to brief the team on the weekly objectives. The teams also have a daily “standup”, in which all team members talk about what they are working on and what issues they have encountered.
We are fairly informal when it comes to demos and retrospectives, although it depends on the team. HockeyApp makes it very easy to distribute test versions within the team, enabling the PM to check the product constantly. When the team is well-oiled, retrospectives do not need to be held on such a formal basis. Instead, they arise when they are necessary and the team asks for them.
This way of working enables us to have very short iterations and develop products very quickly. Because, at the end of the day, the most important thing is to “Make it happen”.
