Below is a walkthrough of best practices for PM-Developer Working Sessions.
When a project is moving through the QA or Quality Assurance process, it is often helpful to run a working session with both the developer(s) on the project and the project manager. This can significantly speed up the process of resolving small issues and bugs on a project.
- Technology: Teams, Web Browser of Choice
- Sphere: Development
- SDLC: Quality Assurance
- Cadence: Throughout the Development phase of the project lifecycle
- The first step to preparing for this meeting is for the project manager to create a punch list of items to be addressed during the working session. This should be created via a global review of the project build in the QA environment (PROJECT ABBREVIATION-qa.clarityclient.com) as well as a more granular QA review of specific project tickets. A walkthrough of this more granular QA review can be found here.
- The goal of this initial step is to create a list of small, discrete visual or minor functionality issues that are present on the QA environment that need to be addressed and can be addressed relatively quickly.
- Once this list is created, the project manager should schedule a working session with the developer(s) to work through these issues. This meeting should last anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours, depending on the length of the punch list. The project manager should be mindful of the developer(s)'s other obligations (to other projects and to other meetings) when scheduling this working session.
- During this meeting, the project manager should walk through the punch list one item at a time. Each item should be worked in real time by the developer(s) on the call. And the PM should review and approve the resolution/fix for each item before moving onto the next item on the list.
- Obviously, there will be downtime for the project manager while each item is being worked on. The project manager should plan to have background work available for themselves during this downtime - if work for the same project is available, all the better. Possible items include EP audits, Backlog reviews, EP Needs Reallocation work, etc. It is important to be mindful about being productive and adding value to a project when expending billable hours.
- NOTE: It is also important to keep productive use of billable hours at the forefront of your mind in other meeting situations as well. If you have developers attending a client meeting, it is a good idea to either front-load their active participation to the beginning of the meeting and invite them to log off of the meeting after their active participation has concluded OR to back-load their active participation to the end of the meeting and invite them to only log-on to the meeting at the pre-agreed upon time towards the end of the meeting and conclude the meeting with the portion requiring their active participation. This way the developer will only be recording billable time to the project for the time in which they are actively engaged in adding value to the project.
- The meeting should conclude when all items on the punch list that can be quickly addressed have been worked on by the developer(s) and their resolution/fix has been reviewed by the project manager. If the pre-scheduled time for the meeting has been exhausted and all punch list items have not been addressed, a follow-up meeting should be scheduled by the project manager.