Operational Excellence Assessment Guidance 03 How Do You Formalize Software Ideation and Planning Process

Your team’s ability to produce high-quality software relies on a structured, collaborative approach to development planning. Product owners and managers must be able to clearly understand and articulate to stakeholders the work that developers are doing at any time in a development cycle. Conversely, developers must understand the goals of the development cycle via well-written features, user stories, and acceptance criteria.

Your team approaches software development as an interdisciplinary activity across multiple perspectives and roles. Therefore, they ensure that the development cycles are planned with representatives of all parties involved.

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You rely on well-known planning processes, such as scrum, and planning tools, such as Azure DevOps. This standardization not only simplifies the collaboration with other teams but also accelerates the onboarding process of new members.

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To keep user stories and work items manageable, you use deployments that can be made available to your users as small product increments, rather than designing features that require deploying large changes in an irregular cadence.

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You have agreed-on standards and quality criteria to define meaningful user stories and backlog items. You have a shared understanding of the level of details they require, a process to refine and plan their implementation and check their acceptance criteria.

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The acceptance criteria are the “definition of done,” and functional and non-functional requirements drive development and testing activities.

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After finishing with the implementation of a user story, the team performs a retrospective to take learnings for the next development cycle.

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