How release planning can bring remote teams together
Reflections on how in-person release planning can be a great opportunity to bring colleagues together and boost team morale.
Reflections on how in-person release planning can be a great opportunity to bring colleagues together and boost team morale.
Hi! I'm Rachael, and I work as a developer on the ArcGIS Maps SDK for Native Apps team at Esri. We create developer tools for creating geospatial applications with our native Swift, Kotlin, Qt, .NET and Java SDKs. In this "day in the life of a developer" blog series, I'll be sharing my day to day experiences of what it's like working as a developer creating mapping and geospatial code!
I was inspired to start this series of blogs following a recent highlight at work: getting our remote team together, in person, to discuss release planning! It doesn't sound like a highlight does it: pre-pandemic, this wouldn't have been anything particularly special. But having worked remotely since that day in March 2020, the team getting together to discuss release planning was a work event to look forward to (even for this introvert used to working from home!).
In this blog I'll share some history and my personal reflections of shifting to working from home during the pandemic, and how things are going now. I'll also generally muse on how suggesting, and gently encouraging, in person meet ups to your team can be a real boost for individuals and the team as a whole.
Before Covid changed everything, the Native SDKs team were based in our Holyrood Park House office in Edinburgh, Scotland's capital city.
From our hub there, we'd carry out our daily development work during the day before checking in with our American-based Native SDKs colleagues over conference phones and meeting room web cams.
The office prior to the pandemic (image: www.loopnet.ca)
The majority of our colleagues are based in Esri's headquarters in Redlands, California (or other locations in North America), meaning we have an 8 hour time zone difference to consider when arranging meetings.
As a software development division, these meetings are typically run within the Agile approach and consist of daily scrum meetings, and fortnightly (the length of our sprints) sprint reviews, retrospectives, and sprint planning.
Esri HQ, Redlands, California
Our time zone difference means most of our over the pond meetings are scheduled in our late afternoon, toward the end of the working day. As a result of attending these regular remote meetings (from within the office or at home as some colleagues preferred), we were all pretty used to joining Teams calls and discussing work with distributed colleagues.
Which was really just as well because then...
The Edinburgh office is closed when UK government guidance instructs those who can work from home to do so. Staff are asked to collect what they need to work from home and then leave the building immediately.
Working from home wasn't too much of an adjustment work wise. We were used to virtual meetings to connect with our globally distributed colleagues and teams anyway, and had a good structure in place.
But two years of working from home and a lack of in-person contact in a physical office felt like a long time for me personally. During this time the original office was permanently closed, and with social distancing rules on and off, we had no easy option to get together for team meetings.
After social distancing rules slowly eased off, it was easier to get together with small groups of colleagues for walks and outdoor catch ups over picnic benches: especially for meeting new members of the team who had joined remotely!
It was therefore a welcome announcement when a new office location was found. Despite requiring a refit, it would now allow us an office space to at least have the possibility of meeting up as a team together again, and provide an office space for those who wished to have a break working from home.
After nearly 3 years of working from home, I've found it can be a great way to increase productivity and focus (no office distractions, no commute). But I've also missed in-person contact! Especially for those random idea generating conversations, creative spark from gathering round a white board, and a sense of team solidarity and togetherness.
Our new office in central Edinburgh gives us that opportunity to meet up in person again, and the teams involved with the Native SDKs development are making the most of opportunities to get co-located colleagues together for in-office meetings.
Most recently, the ArcGIS Maps SDK for Java team got together to plan for the upcoming release.
The ArcGIS Maps SDK for Java team are mostly UK based, with fairly easy access into Edinburgh by public transport. There are 8 of us on the team, with a daily morning stand up meeting held virtually (sometimes with our pets wagging tails or meowing in).
Click on each image to learn more about the engineers and developers (and maybe some pets!) on the team!
With the new office accessible, the Java team decided to host a special get together to discuss release planning.
Tempted in by promises of burritos, post it notes, marker pens and good coffee (and great company obviously), we all made the formerly "normal" commute trek to the office....
... with the exception of our scrum master Duc who opted to attend via Teams, thus avoiding an arduous commute across the North Atlantic Ocean ;)
One day we will have him over for burritos!
Fuelled by burritos, we gathered in the office (Duc by laptop) and began sticking a flurry of post-it notes to the huge windows of our office, with each post-it representing an issue to be considered for release planning.
With the whiteboard (repurposed from a footie sweepstake!) we scribbled a rough estimate for a realistic workload for the duration of the release, based on the number of team members and sprints available.
With a total of 5.5 people (includes part-time and onboarding staff) available for 6 sprints in the release, in a perfect world that would give us 5.5 * 6 = 33 person sprints for the release.
However, realistically we also have to account for unplanned time away such as holidays, illness, training, bugs fixes etc. So we used a back of the envelope calculation to give around 28 person sprints to plan for over the course of the release.
We then as a team estimated how many sprints we thought each release task would take.
After multiple switching around of post-it notes on the window and fruitful team discussions querying their place, we settled on 9 "must have" release tasks out of the original 14 candidates.
Our code generator task had the most unknowns when it came to estimating, so we dug a bit deeper in there to figure out what was required. That release tasks ended up as the highest estimate at 9 points.
I found this kind of in-person team meeting invaluable to motivation, inclusion and team building. It was the first time we'd been together as a team since before the pandemic, and for some, the first time meeting colleagues in person that they'd only met over Teams before.
Everyone being in the same room (including Duc on the laptop!) naturally led to other team working opportunities for the team, such as pair programming to brainstorm a sneaky bug following one of our recent upgrades. In-person interaction meant we were able to target that bug immediately and efficiently, and discuss a strategy to deal with it in the same room.
Breaking down communication barriers by just merely being in the same space together proved very valuable, especially so for newer members of the team. It was a great chance for them to contribute ideas for discussion, have those contributions recognised by the wider team and ultimately improve the product.
All in all it was a really fun day to see the rest of the team together, and come together for a common purpose! I'm not sure a release planning meeting has ever been quite so fulfilling.
The pandemic caused many to shift from office to home-based working. Some found working from home was ideal and offered their most productive way of working; others found it isolating, and de-motivating. Everyone is different and there is no right or wrong way of working: whatever works for the individual ultimately results in better life/work balance and employee happiness, thus benefitting the team and employer.
In this post-pandemic work place where hybrid working is becoming more the norm, I think it's important to at least ask your remote-based team if they'd like to get together in person every once in a while. As I found, it can be such a morale boost and give your work renewed meaning, and provide team bonding opportunities.
So if your team are open to it, look for opportunities such as release planning, sprint planning, reviews or retrospectives to get the team together in person. You might be surprised by the hidden benefits it has on both individual well-being and product bug fixing. Not to mention having fun pics of the day to refer back to over the course of the release...see below!
Release planning post-it notes live on to this day! And will continue to do so as we complete each Sprint and look back on our progress. Not long til we start collecting those Complete trophies.
All views within this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Esri.