Agile Workflow Instead of Communication Chaos

This article provides an overview of the agile project workflow we use, implemented with the help of the issue and bug tracking system YouTrack. All from a developer's perspective.

A Look Back

Who hasn't experienced it? Change requests from clients usually arrive by email or, in very urgent cases, by phone. Recipients are typically project managers or developers, but sometimes even the boss. Now here's the crucial point: these change requests were then immediately forwarded internally within the agency via email to the relevant designers, developers, or project managers – which, with several simultaneous projects in the pipeline, inevitably ended in chaos. In seemingly very urgent or very simple cases, it's even more direct – following the principle of the shortest route, just by calling out: "Can you just quickly...?"

According to studies, such small interruptions cost developers 15 or even 30 minutes to fully refocus on the original problem. Apart from that, all communication regarding change requests is stored in emails, on notepads, and, most importantly, in the team's heads. This makes it difficult for everyone involved to maintain an overview and work with concentration. A solution was needed, but classic bug trackers are too developer-focused and rather unsuitable for project managers, designers, and clients. After a long search, however, we found what we were looking for last year and would like to give you an insight into our experiences.

The Agony of Choice

After thorough research and testing of many bug, issue tracking, and project management systems such as Jira, Redmine, Trac, Erpal, etc., we chose YouTrack for the following reasons, among others:

• Adaptable to our individual workflow
• Combination of project management, bug tracking, and time tracking
• Central documentation of all changes and communication
• Integration with our Continuous Integration system (to be discussed in a later post)
• Ability to quickly structure client inquiries (creation of quotes, also to be blogged about later)
• Sophisticated role system to grant clients access to project areas

Efficient and Agile Workflow

Since we already structure, describe, and divide projects into smaller tasks or tickets during the quotation phase, we can start implementation more quickly once a project begins. All features and user stories are already defined and, if necessary, further divided into smaller sub-tickets.

Communication and Documentation of Changes All changes, additional information, or questions are stored with the respective tickets. Any queries to the client are handled via the system wherever possible. Clients can also create new tickets via email. This ensures that all parties involved are always on the same page.

Prioritisation of Tickets To assess the importance of processing tickets, the following priorities are assigned:

• Minor
• Normal
• Major
• Critical
• Show-Stopper

Tickets marked as "Critical" and "Show-Stopper" are usually fundamental building blocks and extremely important for project success. These are therefore treated as a priority and implemented first. Bugs also fall into this category.

Weekly Sprints Usually 2-4 weeks in advance, project managers compile a weekly sprint from ongoing projects and numerous tickets and assign them to individual people. In the so-called Agile Board, all project participants now have an overview of upcoming tasks, categorised by priority. As mentioned, tickets are either already assigned or "Unassigned". This allows team members involved in the project to divide the tickets among themselves.

Daily Processing of Tickets Based on the sprints defined for the week, the most important tickets are started according to priority. The status of the ticket is then set to "In Progress" and is also displayed on the Agile Board mentioned above. This gives everyone an overview of what is being worked on. This eliminates the need for multiple daily inquiries about what is currently being worked on and what has already been fixed.

If there are any questions or ambiguities, the relevant ticket is commented on directly and simply assigned to the desired team member. This member receives a notification and can respond directly via email (which is stored in the ticket) or via the UI. This keeps all communication in a central location and prevents it from being scattered across emails, notes, or in people's heads.

After implementing the ticket, the status is set to "Fixed" to indicate that everything is provisionally complete. YouTrack automatically informs the project managers or the creator of the ticket and assigns it. Once the implementation has been reviewed and is complete, the ticket is finally closed. If there is still something to do, the status can be set back to "Open" accordingly.

Through the integration of YouTrack with our Continuous Integration system, tickets can also be closed with a corresponding commit message and set to "Fixed". My colleague Sebastian will be writing an article about this shortly.

Stumbling Blocks and Potential for Improvement

Just a "little bit" of issue tracking, project management, and continuous integration doesn't really work. We have found that it is extremely important to reflect and enter everything in the system – this is the only way to ensure that the flood of information and change requests is kept in check and that an overview is not lost. Client inquiries via email or phone should be entered directly and thus documented.

For "just a quick question" or "can this be done?" inquiries, we sometimes still tend to bypass the system as a team. If a question or change request seems trivial, it sometimes seems pointless to us to enter it as a ticket. However, one is not aware in that situation that a seemingly quick inquiry might interrupt colleagues and break their concentration (which, as described above, costs up to 30 minutes of working time). We need to adhere more strictly to the workflow here.

For activities that cannot be directly assigned to a ticket or cover multiple tickets, it is often difficult to accurately record the actual effort, or it is not immediately clear that a separate ticket should be created. For example, when testing the entire project before going live.

Conclusion

No question, the system is already an enormous increase in efficiency for our internal workflow. We all wouldn't want to be without it. Due to YouTrack's flexibility, we are guaranteed to continuously expand and optimise our workflow with the right adjustments over time.