The Mobile Apps Team has been chatting about its process around Trello boards recently, and the following issues were identified with our current "one board for both iOS and Android" structure:
- The iOS and Android engineering efforts are completely separate.
- Each platform has its own tech lead.
- The iOS engineers only work on iOS cards, and the Android engineers only work on Android cards.
- The codebase between the apps is not shared (except for a little bit of JS).
- Slack on one platform can’t be picked up by the engineers on the other.
- The iOS and Android engineers have different velocities. Part of this is because Android currently has an additional engineer, but it’s also because the cards are disjoint and therefore slight differences are emerging in how the cards are estimated.
- Tracking these different velocities separately of each other is senselessly difficult with a single shared board, because you have to apply and remove filters to do so.
- In the past, features were implemented on both platforms at the same time, but that isn’t happening anymore due to velocity differences.
- Engineers almost always have a filter on to only show the cards for the platform they work on, so having the cards from the other team in their board has little use.
In short, the team has decided that having a single board for both iOS and Android isn’t actually serving anyone in the team anymore, and instead it’s just causing some slight inconveniences.
We’re going to try having separate boards for the iOS and Android apps in sprint 40. The meeting structure will remain the same; we are still a single team, and the engineers from both platforms share a lot of expertise and ideas with each other, and we don’t want to lose that. This experiment is ultra safe-to-fail, as if we decide it’s not working at any point then we can immediately move all the cards into a single board then archive the second board.
Let me know if there are any questions.