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Ways of working

The GovPress business unit works flexibly, depending on the needs of our clients. We are organised into a number of teams, which work on client projects and work paid for on retainer. We are not dogmatic about exactly who works on which piece of work, but this document describes our expected way of working throughout the year.

Sprinting teams #

Sprinting teams work on longer (>2 weeks) projects which clients pay for separately (i.e. not via retainers). Sprinting teams are not static, we create them when we have work available and each team is chosen to meet the needs of the work.

Note that sprinting teams will often be small. Where architecture and code review become a burden, the team may use pair or mob programming to speed up delivery.

Team members will be scheduled for work on this team, before each project begins. These schedules will be coordinated by the Delivery Lead.

The team #

This team:

Cadence #

Each project in this team will run roughly like a Scrum project:

Maintenance and support team #

This team works on tasks which are paid for via support and maintenance retainers. Some members of the team may work on tasks that are paid for separately, but last much less than a 2 week Scrum sprint.

Where we have larger pieces of work that require several developers or longer periods of time (including site migrations), we create a new sprinting team, led by one of the Tech Leads.

Where we have larger pieces of work (>1day) that are too small for a sprinting team, wherever possible these are taken on by a minimum of two developers, one of which will usually be a Tech Lead.

The team takes overall responsibility for the maintenance of our products and internal tooling, including creating new tools and processes that help to keep our workflows efficient. However, everyone is encouraged and expected to resolve maintenance issues when they come across them, or raise Trello cards for this team where tasks are too large to be completed in the course of other work.

The team #

This Maintenance and Support team:

Cadence #

There is no expectation that this team works in sprints, or follows Scrum. The cadence of this team is very loosely based on eXtreme Programming (XP):

GovPress-wide meetings and events #

The whole GovPress team comes together for regular catch-ups, including:


Last updated: 9 November 2023 (history)