Team growth, first steps

And now new employees come to the office - a designer and programmer. They are already presented to His Majesty the Project, the Idea glows in their eyes, and the designer's hands squeeze the mouse with varying dpi, even with us this was not promised.



People in passing are presented to each other - what are the fiery speeches if friends come back to us, with whom we have done one thing since childhood? A programmer from the beautiful city of Omsk, where he spent his childhood and designer. Designer, more than a year living in the center of St. Petersburg. The programmer, talented designer and our team ...



Everything is clear, but what exactly?

')

There is an idea, an understanding of perspective is there, we must get down to work.



The group that builds websites to order may be small: for it, the manager for working with clients, the designer and the layout designer, is enough for her to exchange information by phone or Skype. As the team grows, teamwork is required.



When I planned the growth of the company, of course, there was a question about teamwork and software for these purposes. Everyone I contacted advised basecamp . Our programmer suggested trac . Himself soared, Russified, told and shown. From this moment a new era began. The era of perplexed silence: any task is entered into the truck and is performed by a person in a planned manner, depending on priority. Oral statement of tasks is prohibited due to time unprofitability (perhaps to the questioner, and it seems that the solution of his task will take only 5 minutes, but in order to restore the programmer’s normal rhythm, return it to the main task, it often takes much longer after such a switch for example, try to restore the meaning of the narrative interrupted by brackets!). Tasks, no matter how simple they seem, are recorded in tickets, glitches and errors, questions and suggestions go there too. The project is entering a continuous improvement phase.



With the advent of the new system of work comes a new slang. All tasks now need to "hang up", the word "fixed" takes its literal meaning. The word “workflow” ceases to be a word and becomes a flow, a circulation of information.

Implied Workflow

1. When a problem arises (it does not matter if it is a bug, a small fix or a new feature) ALWAYS creates a new ticket.
   
   Ticket is assigned to Mylston (deadline), i.e. the period until which it needs to be closed (i.e., complete the task).
   
   The developer looks at the list of open tickets and takes those that he can close.
   
   The developer is working on one or several tickets. In this case, the ticket (s) change the status to assigned, i.e. "in the process". Thus, you can always see who is busy.
   
   After completing the task, the developer closes the ticket.
   
   
   
   NB A developer can be a designer, administrator, etc., that is, any person involved in a project. Therefore, tickets are created for everyone. The ideal option to strive for: no tickets - no work, there are tickets - there is work. The average number of tickets per working day is 3 - 4 pieces.
   
   
   
   How to create a correct ticket
   
   
   
   Tickets are of several types. The most common ones are defect (bug, error) and task (new feature). When creating a ticket, it is important to correctly specify all its parameters and clearly describe the task or error. If a bug ticket is added, the following data must be specified in the ticket description:
   
   
   
   
   • URL of the page with the error
     
     Actions to be taken
     
     What was expected after these steps
     
     What is the result really
     
     
     
     Ticket parameters that you MUST specify when creating:
     
     
     
     
     • Shor summary
       
       Type (type) - defect (bug), enhancement (small non-critical improvement), task (new feature)
       
       Priority (Priority) - bloker (prevents the closure of other tickets), critical (do as quickly as possible), major (do), minor (do in your free time), trivial
       
       Component - The component of the system to which the ticket belongs
       
       Milestone - the term to which you need to close the ticket
       
       Version (VideoZZ version to which the ticket belongs) - trunk (the current version in Subversion) and deployed (what is uploaded to the server)
       
       
       
       Milestones (so-called milestone) of the project, the timing of a certain set of improvements. The tickets themselves are linked to milestones, priority, and also divided into tasks (task), improvements (enchantment) and bug reports (defect). Tasks are all that require more than one iteration or discussion, improvements - small specific improvements in the project's work. Bugreports are no longer spoken to the programmer, but are recorded by all project participants.
       
       
       
       Sign up the ticket - follow it! The task is placed on a component of the project (video player, site interface or social component), necessarily signs in the detailed description, which facilitates subsequent documentation. Truck is associated with the repository and has a built-in wiki that allows you to tie together the entire development process (“waiting for such a ticket” or “described in detail in such a comment”, “changes in the code according to such a ticket”). Notifications to the post office about everything regarding the change of a ticket, everyone who is affected by this ticket (to the user, the owner of the component who commented on) - this is how the issue of information exchange in the group is resolved.
       
       
       
       All the necessary information on the project is put on the main page of the project track: participants, milestones, a brief description of the project and its components, terms and readiness, where everything lies and who is responsible for what. In the tickets themselves, the tasks are written in detail, conditionally speaking to the unit managers - owners of the components. The main work on the assignment of tasks and priorities is undertaken by the project manager, leaving the horizontal level to independent management:
       
       
       
       Need to make chat history? Designer - draw a page and give it to a programmer who will plug in and connect it. Along the way, the order of messages in history is discussed, from top to bottom or from bottom to top, the most recent ones on top and on the first page or should the page numbering be from the beginning of the story? Answers to such questions are written down in detail to each ticket, and the notorious “usability” consists in these answers. From the unity of the implementation of small things for the visitor there is an impression about the convenience of the site.
       
       
       
       So. Small group is experiencing growth. The development staff is expanded, information circulation is standardized, milestones are defined, responsibility is distributed.
       
       
       
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