How we structured the team

The team consisted of a product owner, a project manager, two full-stack developers, a backend developer (also team lead), a QA engineer, and a product designer.

Project management

We started the collaboration by setting and picking the right tools, processes, and standards. We agreed on using Smartsheet to track high-level requirements and product and technology roadmap that aligns with other product teams within eCapital. We used Jira for tracking work in progress, team performance KPIs, and delivery. Confluence was used for all project, product, and engineering documentation. As a team, we agreed on using SCRUM as a methodology for development with daily standups, grooming, sprint planning, demos, and retrospectives. On top of SCRUM, we were working with the eCapital team on release management and product planning cycles that were outside of the scrum. Our project manager was working very closely with the eCapital change control management team to plan new releases and timelines.

Product management

For every feature that was prioritized for development, we would make sure the feature goes through a discovery process to see how it aligns with business and existing users, what is the marketing strategy behind it, and what is required to create it. The discovery process would get all the necessary details that we needed to schedule a feature for development.

Quality Assurance

We didn’t want to compromise on quality and that is why we created a quality plan that was a part of our project management plan. We focused a lot on tracking code reviews, variances and defects, test case executions, and bugs reported by the customer support team. Our definition of ready and done where important to set a standard for how tickets are written and closed. Engineering teams wrote unit and integration tests to increase our quality and confidence to ship features faster with fewer bugs.

Finance management

Scrum comes with its own challenges and one of them is finances. We used story points for planning the work, but we also created a way to segregate work into timesheets filed under CapEx and Opex, allowing the eCapital finance team to file our work properly. Our team worked very closely with the finance team on sizing new features and initiatives.

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