Hackathons & Teams

In our continuous effort to improve the way we work, we’ve recently implemented two new concepts in our workflow: hackathons & teams.

Before I share the details of these concepts, I need to provide some context. Basically when we started WooThemes 3+ years ago, Mark, Magnus & I did so without any type of “best practice” programming background, which meant that we were simply doing whatever us novice programmers thought yielded the best result. As we’ve grown up, those initial days and workflows have become part of our core processes and routines, which made us a very well-oiled machine.

As time has gone on though, and as the team has grown, we’ve realized that whilst our existing workflow obviously isn’t broken, it could definitely do with some improvements. Improvements in turn means increased efficiency & value for the WooCommunity.

So with that in mind, we’d like to share the two things that we’ve recently implemented that has already made a huge difference to how we work. Neither is groundbreaking or unique in its own right, but the benefits we’ve experienced already at least justifies a blog post.

Hackathons

We’re not big on deadlines & milestones, so our themes have very flexible development timelines – as long as we release two themes a month. What we found though is that the process to get a theme to 95% completed was easy & streamlined, but then the final 5% work – involving final feature inclusions, browser testing, demo setup, bug fixing – took much longer and generally forced us to rush to get it out the door. Rushing towards a deadline means we’re compromising on our time, and we’re probably also missing minor bugs that could’ve been avoided if we weren’t rushed.

Hackathons scheduled in our Basecamp calendar.

To improve on this, we’re now scheduling a hackathon as soon as we get the theme to 95% completion. A hackathon could be 6 hours, or 2 days and during this time the responsible WooTeam members focus all of their time & energy to wrap up the theme ready for release. No one is to bother the team members with other tasks during their hackathon, so there are no distractions which means that the last 5% is completed in a much smoother process.

A by-product of this has been that we’ve actually included additional functionality in both our recent releases (Statua & Editorial) due to the focused time that the guys could spend on both themes during their hack days. Double win.

Teams

A WordPress theme in itself isn’t really big enough to have the 7 developers and designers of the WooTeam working on it at once, because we’d inefficiently be stumbling over each other’s feet. So we’ve all been basically doing our own thing, working on our assigned theme tasks on the to-do lists. This workflow however sometimes results in certain projects not being wrapped up (efficiently or at all), since there’s no one that takes responsibility for the whole project from start to finish.

We are countering this with the use of internal teams. Basically this means that for every theme we create a mini-team, which generally consists of a project lead (who is responsibility for quality assurance & project management), a support ninja (who also does the basic WooFramework integration) and an advanced developer (currently either Matty or Jeff, with Warren to soon start helping out). Every mini-team therefore has the necessary skills to complete the project at hand.

What we’ve seen is that this brings an increased efficiency to our workflow, because the team can now take proper responsibility for their tasks and they can also keep each other accountable. Having 3 people actively working on the same project means a quicker project, and hopefully means we can start building up a backlog of themes to release, buying us more time to work on innovative features for the framework.

Team Comarty creating awesomeness!

Feedback from the guys has also indicated that they enjoy the fact that their little teams almost generate their own identity (Mark, Cobus & Matty recently worked together on Editorial & “branded” their team as Comarty), which results in a closer collaboration. Whilst this is seemingly simple and the idea for teams again isn’t unique, it’s not necessarily something that is so obvious in a small team like ours. Again though, the benefit has been massive.

Do you have any experience with either of these concepts or something similar? What do you do within your teams to boost efficiency & productivity?