War Room Series Part 1: What is it?

What is War Room?

There is a time between feature complete and the release of code to the public that is used to stabilize complex features and products. That time for us here at Knowbe4 is called War Room.

When a SCRUM team determines a feature has reached feature completion, we go into the War Room phase. War Room is the process of getting products and features shipped to the public as soon as possible with the least amount of critical bugs and code churn. The team consists of a Release Manager, the SCRUM team, plus other areas of R&D, and Product Managers. The Release Manager, who is the leader of the War Room process, will help manage those teams to work together to ship the code with approved code churn only. The Release Manager will take the daily standup meeting already scheduled and convert that into a 15 minute time boxed daily meeting while in War Room.

The role of Release Manager for War Room is very important:

• Each War Room will have a Release Manager
• This role is usually held by someone from the QAE team
• This person is responsible for running the War Room meetings
• Release Manager will send out a meeting minutes daily after each War Room meeting
• The Team is not allowed to check code into the master branch without the Release Manager approval
• The Release Manager has the final approval

As a Release Manager for War Room here at Knowbe4, I can say that we have been very successful in getting great products and features out to our customers. We follow this proven War Room process which allows us to ship on time and more importantly, with very few critical bugs.

This is the beginning of a short blog series about War Room, this first post is explaining what War Room is, followed by posts about the bug bar and the rules. After the blog series is complete, you will be able to use this process in your organization. Everyone involved will be happy that you do, along with your customers because the product that you release will be of the highest quality!