How we adopted speed as a habit for completing projects

If you are a part of a product company where deadlines are missed — or say, the last minute requirements, scope creeps, miscommunication and unreliable estimations stop you from completing projects. Then, don’t stop reading. Let’s just say, we’ve been there but found our way out of it and you will too, once you are done with this blog. This is a story of how we used the logic of tech to speed-en up the process for the magic of travel.

Our existing process

We, Pickyourtrail,are a travel tech startup who believe in the concept of hassle-free vacations for users. It starts right from booking their deals to providing support during their trip. This meant the platform should be hammered to perfection in terms of UI and UX. Also, the business requirements revolved around critical features which enhanced the overall customer experience. Given the necessity of such vital features, the amount of time we initially invested in implementing these were close to 3–4 months. So, we had to wait for a considerable amount of time to test and use a newly released feature.

Our initial process flow starts with the listing of business and design requirements followed by planning and estimation. We then chart out the plans for completing an entire functionality, by going in-depth. The various ideas behind the tasks assigned for the process lurk in the documents and because of this, there wasn’t a clear and open visibility on pending tasks. Most importantly, ownership of the assigned tasks.

Pain points

The problem we faced with this waterfall approach was that it did not allow much reflection or review. Once we take up an application for testing, it is very challenging to go back and change something that was not well-documented or speculated upon in the concept stage. Modifying scope during the life cycle even lead to termination of projects.

Adding to this, there were no visual tracking tools or artifacts to measure our progress. So, we had to test our projects towards the end, making it tough for the team to identify and fix bugs within the short span of time.

Here are a few hurdles we faced with our existing approach.

• Team progress was not scalable
• Challenges in orchestrating, organizing sub-tasks
• Complete testing was done only at the end of projects
• Requirements weren’t written in a user/job story format
• Offered low bandwidth to test and fix bugs
• Bugs and defect management posed a challenge
• Report creation took time
• Prime function failures in our product
• Insufficient testing performed in the lower environment
• Tasks additions towards the end of the project

Interesting read: Solve your slow page loads!

Our plan of action!

Never settle. Yes, that’s exactly what made us think of an approach where the challenges we faced were slain to the fullest. We tried our hands on JIRA — a bug-issue tracking and a project management tool. Once we introduced the tool in our team, the process turned out to be an easy one with custom scrum boards for us to visualize the entire workflow and progress.

Our requirements started with high-level user stories, which were then categorized into epics. The sprint backlog was created based on the priority and estimation with story points and with every sprint completion — our achievement rates were measured. We were also able to track the bugs which tiled the stability and effectiveness in terms of defect management. The icing on top? We witnessed a huge improvement in the delivery speed of committed tasks.

Optimizing for maximum impact

During the course, we also used multiple features that were available in Jira. For instance, the simple board arrangement will only have three stages but on configuring it, we got to put a number on the stages we wanted in the project flow. Our current board consists of 8 different stages now. The best part about this is, the flow can be directed in the backend.

Yet another interesting feature of Jira is the Swimlanes. For starters, Swimlanes is the horizontal equal to columns on a board. Unlike columns, which gets mapped to issue statuses, you can map your Swimlanes to various processes. The Swimlanes views we use in Pickyourtrail are those of task assignee, due dates and overall features. This has majorly helped us get a clearer view of the tasks in motion, new tasks and pending tasks with the bonus of having a different perspective of the tasks in the same sprint.

In a nutshell, by adopting this simplistic approach — we achieved sustainable product delivery whilst maintaining high quality, team morale and customer satisfaction.

Benefits of using Jira

• Larger projects can be broken down into easily manageable sprints
• Overcome delivery deadline misses
• Flexible enough to handle changes
• Deliver working software frequently
• Create self-organizing teams
• Improve visibility and team morale
• Measure our progress with every working software that we deliver
• Get quick feedback to learn and improve with every sprint

Potential drawbacks of Jira

• Daily rituals might frustrate the team
• The temptation to add or change requirements
• This approach works well only for small teams

While it all boils down to choosing an agile method which suits you the best, we at Pickyourtrail will give maximum points to Jira for defining the workflow, managing daily tasks and tracking the progress of the work done by our team.

Thinking about taking a break after managing the process and progress flow of your team? Worry less because we hear you! Unwrap the world by planning that dream vacation of yours the way you want with Pickyourtrail.

Thanks to Naren aka Ninja — our in-house tester & scrum expert for giving his valuable inputs for the blog.