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• Daily standups

  • This is a quick opportunity to share what you’re up to, flag any blockers, and ask for help. This keeps everyone in sync and also provides visibility to everyone as to what the team is actively working on.

  • Since we’re distributed across timezones, we use a daily Slack thread for async updates instead of having a meeting later in the day

• Backlog refinement

  • Prior to sprint planning, we regularly review the backlog to ensure stories are still relevant and to give us an idea of what’s coming so we can plan the upcoming sprint

  • We use planning poker for all developers to assign points to each story using a Fibonacci scale, which indicate the amount of effort (not time) that each story requires to develop

• Sprint planning

  • Before starting a sprint, we have a meeting to determine what everyone will be working on for the next two weeks. Stories from the backlog are selected by each developer based on the point assigned to them during refinement.

  • Developers are encouraged to have autonomy over the stories they choose from the backlog. This process is guided by the number of points they feel they can successfully deliver within the sprint timeframe and priorities set out by stakeholders as determined during other meetings.

• Retrospectives

  • We continuously deploy our work and continuously improve our process. Retrospectives are an important step in the agile process to determine what works and what doesn’t work. Most importantly, this is a blameless process and faults no one as we seek to improve things for everyone

  • We hold a formal meeting at the end of each sprint and an quick informal one midway through the sprint as a healthcheck

• Sprint review

  • This is a meeting near the end of each sprint to showcase our work to stakeholders and gather some feedback to make sure business and developers are still in sync

Throughout this process, we This process is a work in progress. While Spordle is still relatively new to agile, we will likely always consider this process to be a work in progress and flexible to change to adapt our changing needs.

Communication

We use Slack to continuously communicate and collaborate on what we’re working on in. Prefer using channels and groups over direct messages.

Don’t hesitate to work and discuss in the open so that everyone the team has an idea of what you’re working on and can also learn from what you’re doing. While communication in channels is encouraged, that also doesn’t mean we expect participation from everyone is expected in every discussion.

As we’re a distributed team, we default to asynchronous communication which acknowledges that people may be tied up with something else at the moment or in another timezone and having lunch.

It can also be more effective to start a huddle or Meet call sometimes. This can be if you need a quick response, you find yourself going in circles in a chat, or so you can share a screen.