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    UNDERSTANDING THE PROUDCLOUD WAY

    COLLABORATIVE + ITERATIVE + AGILE

  • 1

    THE KICKOFF

    The first step is when we meet with you and other project stakeholders to scope out your goals and objectives. All parties buy-in, schedules the sprints, and discuss the initial project feature list used as the basis for the initial release.

    2

    THE BUILD

    Following our strict code production workflow, we construct a development process uniquely attuned to our client’s existing workflow while observing short cycles of iterations that rapidly ship product.

    3

    COLLABORATION

    The key to a project’s success relies on continued communication between us and the stakeholders. A flow of feedback assures that the development process can quickly adjust course to address challenges and exploit opportunities that may surface throughout the course of the project.

    4

    POST-PRODUCTION

    We know that even after the final product ships, many of our clients require continuous engagement to transition to internal teams, or to provide longer term management and development support.

     

    We make sure this is a smooth process.

  • WORKFLOW

    We don't do fixed bid projects. We engage our clients on a monthly Time & Materials basis, and our clients understand that agile projects are dynamic and constantly changing.

     

    It is with this understanding that, as project features, workload, priorities, and business rules change over time, so do the team delivery estimates and work load. 

    TEAM STRUCTURE

    The typical project team is composed of:

    PRODUCT OWNER

    From the client side, a single point of contact is assigned to work with the our team to participate in sprint planning, feature prioritization, and user acceptance testing. Ideally, this is the Product Manager.

    LEAD PROJECT MANAGER

    A Project Manager (SCRUM) is in charge of balancing tasks, keeping communications flowing, while ensuring that resources are best managed for timely and successful outcomes. He/she also manages each sprint’s scope with the other team members.

    SR. ARCHITECT AND DEVOPS ENGINEER

    The lead developer and architect is an expert in advanced code and infrastructure design. They provide direction, high level supervision, and engineering guidance, ensuring that software best practices are enforced.

    SOFTWARE ENGINEER

    Usually a front-end, back-end, or full-stack coding pair, they will systematically build, complete, and deliver the user stories agreed on in each sprint.

    UI/UX ENGINEER

    Guided by the product owner and PM, he/she builds the initial wireframes, maps out the user flow, and conceptualizes the style/design direction ideal for the product.

    QUALITY ASSURANCE

    The Q/A engineer systematically tests delivered work throughout various stages in the development sprints, to detect any bugs and usability issues before the build is ready for production.

    PAIR PROGRAMMING

    We require assigning a development pair to each project as part of our desire to provide good quality code, less technical debt, and accelerate development cycles. To learn more about the practice of Pair Programming and its benefits, you can visit https://leanpub.com/level_up/read

    WORKFLOW

    We employ Agile methods (A hybrid of SCRUM and XP) for all our development projects.

    • Our development sprints have a 1 week duration, and working days are Mondays to Fridays, following a strict 40-hour work week.
    • A person within the client’s organization will act as Product Owner who will play a key role in defining and prioritizing project stories within sprints.
    • The Product Owner will have access to the project management dashboard and the Project Team on Pivotal Tracker (www.pivotaltracker.com) where progress status are available in real-time.
    • A weekly SCRUM at the start of the sprint is conducted with the Product Owner and the Project Team to review and track current sprints, project issues and backlogs.A weekly SCRUM call will be conducted with the Project Owner and the Project Team to review and track current sprints, project issues and backlogs.
    • A daily 10-15 minute standup 'chat' with the Product Owner will be done on Slack to discuss micro-issues on a day to day basis.
    • Story acceptance is based on real-time testing on the application available on a staging server at the end of each sprint.

  • PROJECT MANAGEMENT METHODOLOGY

    Making use of SCRUM and Pivotal Tracker

    01

    THE ICEBOX

    Feature stories start out in the ICEBOX. The team, populates it with user stories (features), chores, at the start, and throughout the course of the project.

     

    At the start of a sprint, the team collectively decides which stories will be worked on for the duration of the sprint. They are then moved to the BACKLOG for completion and delivery.

     

    Many nice-to-have, but low-value-delivery stories will live in the Icebox until the team decides to include them into the product build roadmap.

    02

    POINT ESTIMATION & VELOCITY

    SCRUM uses a points system to establish the initial estimation of user stories. At Proudcloud, we have adopted 1 point, 3 points, 5 points, and 8 points to represent a user story’s difficulty level the time it will take to complete.

     

    The total points of feature stories in the backlog establish the working Project Velocity. Over time, the computed velocity and projected timelines becomes more accurate.

    03

    THE BACKLOG 

    As user stories are completed in the BACKLOG, the Product Owner can review and accept them. It is important to diligently complete this in a timely manner to keep the velocity calculation as accurate as possible.

     

    This completion, delivery, review, and acceptance of stories continues through out the project. Pivotal Tracker is used in tracking, controlling, and reporting the progress of work throughout time.

     

    Stories that don’t pass UAT can be rejected, indicating the reason. The engineering team then revisits the story, completes necessary fixes, and delivers it for another round of review and acceptance.

  • BEST PRACTICES

     

    We use agile methodologies when we map out and build a project with you. This approach is driven by realistic goals, collaboration, and rapid iterations to ensure quick and successful outcomes.

    PAIR PROGRAMMING

    By programming in pairs, we have two sets of eyes and two minds looking at code during development. This allows our project teams to produce better quality code, reduce technical debt, and achieve efficient development cycles.

    SCRUM

    We practice the SCRUM methodology throughout all our projects. This provides all stakeholders with a clear collaborative path while maintaining quick iterative development cycles that help project owners reach early Minimum Viable Product release.

    THE STANDUP

    The entire engineering crew participates in a weekly 20 minute general standup to discuss all the ongoing projects. This is the venue to discuss issues, roadblocks, solutions, and calls-for-help. In addition to this, a daily standup is conducted on Slack using the Tatsu integration.

    TEST COVERAGE

    We implement tests throughout our work. This helps ensure code integrity as projects evolve over time even as new coding teams join later.

    OUR TOOLS

    Proudcloud uses Pivotal Tracker to manage our agile process, Github for our source code versioning management, and Circle CI for Continous Integration. We also implement AppSignal to alert us to runtime issues as they happen for quick mitigation.

    UI/UX

    When a client requires us to build the UI/UX, we allocate an additional 160 hours for creative work and UI markup development. The first 160 hours (30 working days) of a project are allocated to design work and feedback.

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