Skip to content

work-process.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
86 lines (56 loc) · 6.43 KB

work-process.md

File metadata and controls

86 lines (56 loc) · 6.43 KB

Work Process

Schedule

  • Every Monday and Thursday morning we hold a standup meeting:
    • 12:00 UTC for the whole company in the Niteo Zoom room
    • followed immediately by separate standups for Easy Blog Networks, Kafkai, and WooCart in their own Zoom rooms
  • Every other Tuesday and Wednesday morning we have Scrum meetings:
    • Retrospective on Tuesday, Planning on Wednesday
    • 12:00 UTC for the whole company in the Niteo Zoom room
    • followed immediately by separate meetings for Easy Blog Networks, Kafkai, and WooCart in their own Zoom rooms

Niteans are encouraged to take Fridays off for a long weekend. Same as any other vacation off, make sure that your backup Nitean is available to handle any potential issues (see Vacation policy).

  • Every weekday Niteans should check their GitHub notifications so that they don't miss things that involve them.

Sprint meetings replace the daily standup on these days:

  • A Wednesday is the start of a sprint with sprint planning.
    • 12:00 UTC for the whole company in the Niteo Zoom room
    • followed immediately by separate plannings for Easy Blog Networks, Kafkai, and WooCart in their own Zoom rooms
  • The Tuesday, two weeks later, marks the end of the sprint with a sprint retrospective.
    • 12:00 UTC for Niteo
    • followed immediately by retrospective for Easy Blog Networks, Kafkai then WooCart
  • The Thursday after sprint planning, we have the Developers Session immediately after standups.

The last Monday morning of the sprint everyone should open up the Scrum board and ask themselves: "How can I help close whatever is still opened?". Repeat the same after lunch and on Tuesday morning.

For each new sprint, the Scrum master will create a sprint release that is used to store the user story screencast demos. The template for this release is copied from RELEASE_TEMPLATE.md in the operations repo.

Scrum

Our work process is based on Scrum. Read in detail about our Scrum process and writing User Stories.

  • Sprint length is two weeks.
  • Story points commitment: 10 for each full-time member on the sprint. The total team commitment has at least 25% reserved for bug fixes and cleanup.

Quarterly Review and Planning

Every quarter we take time to review, reflect, and plan for the next quarter. There are three tasks for the Quarterly Review and Planning: Partners Meeting, Quarterly Review, and All Hands Meeting.

Developers Session

We are a remote company and as such sharing of ideas and lessons learned is impaired by the fact that we don't have the time or space to do that effectively.

In the long term, this is hurting everyone and as such Developers Sessions are a way to discuss ideas and questions that might have arisen during retrospective or the sprint. Followed by a short lightning talk(s), which can be impromptu or declared beforehand so others can join.

You can learn something from every single person in the world, no matter what their opinion on any topic is. We also believe that this is a big part of open source and our company, being able to learn and collaborate with people from all over the world who have a wide variety of different opinions on how to do things. On the other hand, a lightning talk can be a perfect way for testing how people react to a talk that you are going to have at next conference or just getting rid of that presentation fear in front of people.

In order for things to not explode, the Session is limited to 60 minutes.

Agenda

As an attendee, ask yourself:

  • Did I have a problem with understanding of implementation I saw during the sprint?
  • Was I annoyed by a particular workflow or something that I think is wasting my time?
  • Did I find a handy tool/method/module that I think we should use?
  • Do I have an idea about implementation we will have in the next sprint, and I want to discuss it?
  • Have I seen a great technical talk and I want to share it so we can discuss it the next time?
  • Do I want to share something I learned in a short lightning talk?
  • Do I need help with the user story I have been assigned to?

As a curator:

  • Announce in #development Zoom session to join into.
  • Prepare a joke or something funny to share.
  • As a curator, meet and greet everyone, especially first-time joiners.
  • Announce who is having the Lightning talk if one was prepared.
  • If you hear crickets, start rolling the ball with a question, an anecdote or a funny story.
  • Make sure no one is talking the whole 30 minutes, everyone should have an opinion!
  • Write a report into the Recurring ticket for the meeting.

Commits and Pull Requests

While working on user stories we often need to change code or text that we keep in GitHub. These changes are done with git commits and are presented to others for review as Pull Requests.

To ensure that your commits and Pull Requests contain everything necessary for a successful review, read through the Git guide for the best practices.

When a User Story or Pull Request is getting close to being completed but there are still open issues, Niteans should have a discussion on Zoom. We don't want to see long PR discussions on GitHub. The author of the issue should ping people on Slack and get them on Zoom to polish things.

Continual Improvement

Big cleanups (of code, documentation, or anything else) happen rarely. They are hard to organize, and to motivate for. Instead of doing big cleanups every few months (years?) when pain levels are high enough, we prefer to do constant tiny improvements with an approach called Continual Improvement.

For Niteo, this means that every Pull Request (except Priority Lane issues) should include at least one minor cleanup commit alongside the main PR commit. It does not need to be related to the main commit, it can be improvements for anything in the repository, however trivial. This can include code and documentation updates, typo fixes, or removal of something that no longer makes sense.