Designing a Workflow and Team Dynamic

The idea behind designing a single workflow is that at any time someone else should be able to jump in to your workflow and know where in the process you are and pick up after you if needed.

In our current development cycle this is imperative because we have people being added to and moved from one project to another on a regular basis. Ideally this would not be the case, but until we can fix that issue we can at lease alleviate some of the stress by setting up a unified workflow.

In order to do this we re going to set up some standards and best practices. One of these items is the standard operating procedure and it will be visable for anyone who has access to confluence. We will define these standards together as a collaborative effort so that they best fit the needs of the team as a whole.

A large portion of the new workflow will be the use of JIRA and CONFLUENCE as tools to enhance our productivity. We will use JIRA to outline all tasks to be done whether it is a bug or a new feature to be added. If you are doing something it should be associated with a ticket in JIRA. Confluence is a giant knowledge base. We will use it to hold all sort of useful information, from who is the tech load for a specific client to setting up a new environment or even just simple links to an useful or interesting article.

Atlassian an also has a product called hipchat that I will be looking into in the coming days. It works much like instant messaging and irc combined in to one. There is 1:1 chat and persistent group chat. This will be a great way for the teams to communicate with each other as well as allowing instant communication with another team member without the need to traverse the maze of desks.