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Working agreement

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Philip Levy edited this page Feb 22, 2021 · 1 revision

Sections:

  • Process
  • Team members
  • Meetings
  • Communication
  • Time
  • Definition of Done
  • Feedback
  • Project Management
  • Iterating on the agreement

Process

  • We work in 6-week cycles with a 2-week break between each cycle.
  • Client work takes priority, but we plan cycles to only include work we can reasonably commit to completing during the cycle.

Team members

  • People actively working on the project may rotate each cycle.
  • Active team members should be able to commit to participating during a full cycle.
  • Everyone is welcome to provide input and feedback at any time.

Meetings

  • Most work is done asynchronously, without meetings.
  • During the two-week break between cycles, there are two dedicated meetings:
    • Cycle retrospective: to discuss what worked well, what didn't, and what changes to try moving foward.
    • Cycle planning: deciding on shaped work to commit to in the next cycle.
  • Other synchronous communication can happen throughout the cycle as needed.

Communication

Time

  • Client work takes priority, but team members should be able to spend about 10% of a work week on this project.
  • Billing for this project is captured under: BIXAL.DESIGN TEAM, 1. Design Research and Training

Definition of Done

  • Includes all user-facing content.
  • Includes additional front matter content as needed.
  • Considers input from members of the UX team.
  • Includes consideration for specific tools and templates.
  • Includes consideration for how to conduct with widely available tools.
  • Follows plain language guidelines, including checking against the plainlanguage.gov list for web.
  • Passes all Lighthouse tests with score of 90 or higher.

Maybe incorporate this out into an issue template.

Feedback

  • If you find a bug, enter it as an Issue.
  • If you have an idea for new content or features, either contribute to or start a Discussion.
  • If you have questions, start a discussion in the Q&A category.

Project Management

Shaping

Before we commit to doing work during a cycle, it must be shaped. That means the problem discovery and problem validation has already happened. See Shaping work in the wiki for more details.

Labeling

Work is grouped into 3 categories:

  • Learn: Discovery and validation activities
  • Make: Content implementation activities
  • Tech: Technical implementation activities

Issues are sized as either small or large.

Each issue added to a cycle is labeled with a combination of a category and a size, for example, make large.

Committing

Committing is the process of deciding what shaped and labeled work is added to the cycle.

All work committed to should have a reasonably probability of being completed during the cycle.

Labeled issues are added to a cycle milestone. All other issues are closed, so each cycle starts with an empty Issue list.

All issues will be assigned to a team member.

Doing

During the cycle, work will be tracked on a project board.

Team members should keep their assigned issues up-to-date by adding comments and links to latest work, and updating the status on the project board.

All work must be reviewed by another team member before being moved to Done.

Deploying

Depending on the nature of the issue, some issues may be deployed immediately. Others may be held and packaged into a release.

Iterating on this working agreement

This agreement will be reviewed between each cycle for potential revisions and enhancements.

Clone this wiki locally