Developer onboarding

Owned by Tomi Mitrovic
Last updated: Sept 21, 2024 by Edouard Larouche
4 min read

Preparation

How we work

Play is a remote agile team that’s distributed across different cities, provinces and timezones, just like the users we build for.

To make this work effectively, we use agile sprints to keep ourselves organized and regular communication throughout the process is crucial.

Development guidelines

  • Branching is kept simple; there is no develop branch or any release branches, just master. The golden rule is that master must always be in a production-ready state. 🚀

    • Why? A code repository is meant for code, and continuous integration tools are meant for deployments and release management. While you can do a lot with git and branching, mixing these responsibilities creates a lot of unnecessary overhead and can provide a false sense of security for developers to merge incomplete work.

  • Play is a full-stack team working in a monorepo with JIRA stories designed to be completed within a single branch for all components (API, apps, etc). 🚄

    • The goal is to be able to review a single pull request and be able to checkout and test that branch easily. We want to be fully confident that a branch is ready to be merged and the story is able to be considered done so it can be shipped and we can move onto the next story.

  • Depending on the nature of the work, we may decide to gate functionality behind flags. This allows us to finely manage releases in the deployment process. 🚉

    • Some work inevitably needs to be done in stages, as we need to break up epics into more manageable stories. If it doesn’t make sense to expose something to users early on, or we only want to expose it in staging initially, flags are a useful tool to manage this.

  • When working on a story/branch, open a draft pull request early on! Once you’ve completed your work, you can mark the pull request as ready for review. 👀

    • Draft PRs provide opportunities for early and continuous feedback, and allows you to share what you’re working on with others to ask for help and collaborate together.

Agile process

  • Sprint planning

    • Before starting a sprint, we have a meeting to determine what everyone will be working on for the next two weeks.

    • We use planning poker for all developers to assign points to each story using a Fibonacci scale, which indicate the amount of effort (not time) that each story requires to develop

    • Developers are encouraged to have autonomy over the stories they choose from the backlog. This process is guided by the number of points they feel they can successfully deliver within the sprint timeframe and priorities set out by stakeholders as determined during other meetings

  • Daily standups

    • This is a 15 minute meeting for everyone to spend a couple of minutes each to share 1) what you worked on yesterday, 2) what you’re working on today, and 3) if you’re blocked on anything. This keeps everyone in sync and also provides visibility to everyone as to what the team is actively working on.

    • This should be a quick meeting to respect everyone’s time, so use it to coordinate more detailed meetings with anyone you need to solve your problems with.

  • Retrospectives

    • We continuously deploy our work and continuously improve our process. Retrospectives are an important step in the agile process to determine what works and what doesn’t work. Most importantly, this is a blameless process and faults no one as we seek to improve things for everyone

    • This is a meeting held at the end of each sprint

  • Sprint review

    • We have an internal review for developers after each sprint to keep everyone in sync and share what’s going on and share achievements. More eyes on each other’s work also often helps find issues before users do.

This process is a work in progress. While Spordle is still relatively new to agile, we will likely always consider this process to be a work in progress and flexible to change to adapt our changing needs.

Communication

  • Prefer using channels and groups over direct messages

    • Don’t hesitate to work and discuss in the open so that the team has an idea of what you’re working on and can also learn from what you’re doing

    • While communication in channels is encouraged, that also doesn’t mean participation from everyone is expected in every discussion

  • As we’re a distributed team, we default to asynchronous communication

    • This acknowledges that people may be tied up with something else at the moment or in another time zone and having lunch

    • Likewise don’t feel pressured to respond immediately when you see a message if you’re in the middle of something. If it’s an emergency the sender should make that clear.

  • It can also be more effective to start a quick huddle or Meet call, don’t hesitate to do so

    • Sometimes you need a quick response, or you find yourself going in circles in a chat, or you want to share a screen