Please describe (at high level) your product enhancement process
From the initial concept, through to a released feature, product enhancements go through several stages.
Product enhancement requests are known as ideas. Ideas must include a user story to help bridge the gap between what customers want and what the developers build.
Ideas are reviewed weekly by the Product team. If accepted, the idea will be promoted to a feature and sit on the product backlog. The product backlog is maintained by the product team but also has input from all areas of the business to ensure features are scored and ranked appropriately. It is possible features are demoted or dropped altogether over time.
Before a feature is ready for development a number of steps must be complete. This includes, requirements gathering, capturing user stories and acceptance criteria, understanding feasibility and effort, prototyping, and high fidelity mock-ups. Features may be broken into many smaller features in order to fit our agile development methodology.
Development is carried out in sprints. What’s developed in that sprint will be determined ahead of time in sprint planning. Releases currently occur at the end of each calendar month (subject to change).
Once a feature has gone through development, code review, QA and sign off, it will be merged into our development environment. Depending on where this falls in the sprint will determine which release version this makes. For example, if a sprint spans a release date, a feature merged at the beginning of the sprint will be in a different release to a feature merged at the end of the sprint.
At this release point, the development environment will be merged to another environment called Staging. The Staging environment is used to host the upcoming release before it is deployed to live environments. Staging is used to perform final QA checks and for internal consultants to explore new features.
At the subsequent release point, the Staging environment will finally be merged to live/production.
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