Platform Backlog
The Platform Backlog is an Asana project to capture technical work that doesn’t directly relate to feature work. This is the work that needs doing to keep our platforms performant, bug free, secure, accessible and maintainable.
“Preparation”
A small portion of your week (2-4 hours) should be spent working on Platform tickets to get them to a state that they can enter the Product Kanban Board. This will include investigating the ticket and documenting answers to the following:
- What is the current impact of the issue?
- What is the impact/risk if we don’t address the issue?
- Are there any deadlines?
- How challenging is the issue to address?
- How long will it take to work on?
Process
- New tickets arrive in the “Inbox”. These are issues that have been identified by the engineering team, or have been reported to us from elsewhere. Tickets with more information are much more viable to pick up and work on.
- Every two weeks engineers meet to triage and discuss new PLAT tickets, assign some preparation work and refine the priority of the “Backlog”
- During the week engineers will “prepare” tickets. Prepared tickets will be moved to “Backlog” once they have enough information to become actionable. The order of tickets in “Backlog” defines their priority.
- Once per month engineering and product meet to promote a batch of PLAT tickets to the Product Kanban Board. This will be a balance of priority and size. PLAT tickets that have been promoted will be moved to “Active”, which triggers an Asana automation to pull them into the Product Kanban Board > To do section
- Engineers will then work on PLAT tickets via the Product Kanban Board as part of their regular workflow.