In the past four weeks the we bumped the project from ~600 hours to ~1200 hours of work, the project currently has two pending main features and a lot of minor details to fix on both ends (API and client).
Here is a list of items I consider are becoming a time sink and causing a lot of the hours consumption:
- Lack of ownership
I’ve noticed that currently the team members don’t take as a priority, the fact that once they open a PR it is their responsibility to make sure that PR is merged and deployed. This represents that as a developer you have to make sure the PR has been reviewed and gone through QA, if there’s any feedback you need to make sure that it gets addressed ASAP, as a reviewer it is your responsibility to make sure your feedback is resolved, this is a two person work and responsibility, team work is key here.
As a developer you need to own your project no matter your role in it, the success of the project is your responsibility, one has to own it.
Submitting a PR and pushing it to master is just part of the work, your role is bigger than that, you need to make sure other team members are up to the task, that the code quality is the best, poor UI should not be acceptable, you need to make sure that you are available for other team members and leave no one behind.
- Low feature development quality
We are ranging between 1 to 3 hours fo time spent on PR reviews and QA, this is not taking into consideration the time that the developer takes to fix the bugs, missing features, or poor UI reported by the QA engineer.
This is a huge time sink, as a developer we all need to make sure that when a PR is submitted that it is at a 95% approval, this means that the developer has already performed QA himself on the work he is turning in, the code complies to our company [code quality standards] (https://github.com/fullstacklabs/wiki/wiki/Code-Quality#3-code-should-be-self-documenting), proper testing(e2e, unit, or integration tests), and proper matching to the designed feature on invision(this would apply if there is an invision mockup provided by the design team).
The delivered solution should comply with the acceptance criteria of your user story, this is important if your PM didn’t provided a list of acceptance criteria make sure you notify him, since this will be your guide of what needs to be delivered.
- Poor communication and team work
We have many channels of communication at FSL, therefore it is not a valid excuse to not raise your hand when you encounter a problem, require help, or have any concern.
One of the main issues we have encountered in ChillNGo is that some of the tasks are underestimated or the time consumed previously by the initial developers was misused(this could be due to poor planning, quality of work, bad architecture, etc…). In projects like this we need to ver very weary and responsible of the time we put on the project, we need to be very assertive and think ahead, for example, make yourself questions like the following:
Is the decision you are taking the right one?
Is it worth spending time on this?
How will your decision impact the project and the rest of the team?
Are we still meeting the deliverables on time, if I take X decision?
Is this decision the only way to fix the problem?
Always keep in mind we need to work as a team, so raise your hand, ask your other team members, discuss with your PM.