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Recommendations for formalizing software development management practices

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Applies to this Power Platform Well-Architected Operational Excellence checklist recommendation:

OE:03 Formalize the software ideation and planning process, drawing from established industry and organizational standards. Use a common, prioritized backlog and sufficiently detailed specifications. Drive continuous improvements in the planning process based on outcomes.

This guide describes the recommendations for managing workload development practices in accordance with established standards. Your team's ability to produce high-quality software relies on a structured, collaborative approach to development planning. Workload teams should understand and clearly communicate to stakeholders the work that's being done. More precisely, workload teams should have a clear view of the work to be done in a development cycle and ensure that all stakeholders are aligned on the "why" of that work. Established standards define how development practices should be performed and allow the workload team to collaborate effectively, reducing the risk of confusion on goals and expectations.

Key design strategies

Formalize your workload development practices to help ensure a common understanding of the goals and expectations.

Don't treat low-code workloads as low-complexity. You still benefit from formalizing the development and management of low-code workloads. Learn from other software development teams. Have a decision matrix in place that dictates the level of formalization that's required based on the complexity and criticality of the workload.

Standards for development planning

The following standards can help you design a comprehensive development planning strategy.

  • Prioritization: Planning the order and scope of the work involves understanding the true impact and value of workload features on the business. It also includes evaluating those impacts against other work requests and the overall roadmap for your product or program. One way to prioritize workloads is by evaluating the business value of the entire workload. You might also find it useful to evaluate individual workload features for the business value.

  • Categorization: Establish processes that ensure that critical applications have the necessary guardrails to support them. At the same time, ensure that productivity scenarios aren't slowed down or stifled by too many rigorous processes.

  • Collaboration: The process of defining proposed changes to the workload should be a collaborative effort. Most changes to the workload affect multiple functions and components, so involving as many workload team members as possible helps ensure that important considerations aren't missed and that everyone is aware of the effect on their particular domain. Collaboration also helps clearly define the scope of a change and how to divide the necessary tasks into well-defined work items. A larger group with expertise across domains is able to provide experience-backed estimates for the required effort.

  • Tools: Use established, industry-proven tools and processes, like Agile, Scrum, and Kanban boards.

Tradeoff: Agile methodology can become too strict if it's overly prescriptive. Strive for a balance between well-defined standards and innovation.

  • Deployment: Plan to use frequent small, iterative deployments instead of large, infrequent deployments.

  • Terms: Standardize your definition of finished development cycles to help ensure that supporting functions, including testing, documentation, and accessibility features, are successfully completed.

  • Communication: Define the standard protocols for product owners and project managers to promote upcoming releases.

  • User stories: Standardize a template for user stories. Well-written user stories should follow the INVEST approach:

    • I–Independent: Each user story should be independent of others, allowing the team to deliver in small incremental steps.
    • N–Negotiable: User stories should be negotiable and open to discussion and change.
    • V–Valuable: User stories should provide value to the customer.
    • E–Estimable: User stories should be estimable and have a clear definition of done.
    • S–Small: User stories should be small and focused on a single feature.
    • T–Testable: User stories should be testable and have clear acceptance criteria.

  • Acceptance criteria: Standardize a template for acceptance criteria. Ensure that acceptance criteria relate specifically to the user story and can be unambiguously proven using one or more acceptance tests.

  • Tracing: Ensure that the development process is traceable. You should clearly trace the state of your production workload and the associated code back to quality assurance testing, acceptance criteria, user stories, and features. Detailed tracing might also be a regulatory requirement in some cases, such as healthcare.

  • Review: Regularly perform internal audits of your development practices through development cycle retrospectives and postmortems. Process reflection should be blameless and should focus on learning that can be applied as improvements. Ensure that the team reflects on how effective the user story and tasks were in defining the necessary tasks and on the accuracy of time estimates.

  • Reports: Standardize reports for stakeholders that provide useful metrics focusing on change. Focusing on change allows you to track product acceleration and deceleration. Helpful metrics can include changes in:

    • Monthly growth rate of adoption
    • Performance
    • Training time
    • Frequency of incidents

    Reporting shouldn't be used as a tool to evaluate the work of individuals, so avoid metrics like story points or lines of code for each engineer.

Power Platform facilitation

Although there are no Power Platform products that directly facilitate this recommendation, you can use other tools in the Microsoft stack. Azure Boards is a web-based service that enables teams to plan, track, and discuss work across the entire development process.

GitHub Projects is a customizable project management tool for organizing projects and integrates with your issues and pull requests in GitHub.

Next steps

Operational Excellence checklist