Signagelive stays Agile, but what does that mean for our Customers?

This week saw us perform a Platform Update which gave you the new Player Dashboard and access to the Proof of Play BETA.

You might be wondering, what happens now?

We are already working on the next release, which will be Proactive Monitoring. The Dashboard release contains a lot of the configuration for this, all of the KPI settings you can change for the Dashboard are what will be used to configure Proactive Monitoring.

We still need to work on the actual delivery of the Notifications and make sure we have the right infrastructure in place.

We will also be taking the feedback from the Proof of Play BETA  and any feedback you have for the Player Dashboard and then releasing updates when appropriate.

Release Planning

Thats all well and good, but how do we decide what goes into a Release?

At Signagelive we, as a Development team, work to Agile methodologies, this means we can cope with quick changes to priorities and requirements. When we plan a Release our backlog is reviewed, the backlog includes all current issues and feature requests, and in conjunction with our support and sales teams, these have been prioritised to their effect on Customers and improving the platform in the best way.

The more customers reporting an issue or requesting a feature the higher its priority goes.

There are of course other ways to boost the priority.

Using a formula of effort and priority, items get put in to the release backlog, and then we as a team work through that backlog.

The thing with Agile, is that actual time scales aren’t put on work, just an estimated amount of effort, meaning we can’t put exact release dates in place at the start of a release, just a date we are aiming for, one of the things non Agile teams find difficult to get to grips with.

The other part of Agile is that unfortunately some planned items may get removed from the release as other items jump up in priority, time scales for a release change, or customer projects are added into the backlog.

But by being Agile it also means that we can do quick releases to the current platform if we find major faults affecting large numbers of customers.

So over the coming weeks we will be reviewing the backlog and putting a release plan in place, if you follow the weekly dev blogs then you will be kept up to date with our plans.