Daily Practices
There are several daily practices that we have found helpful to keep communication flowing within the team and our clients. These practices are followed Monday-Friday for billable and non-billable time.
Beginning of the day
Within the first hour of starting your day, it's important to check-in to share with your clients and the team what your intentions for the day are.
Check-in on Slack
A good check-in highlights three things:
Blockers; are you waiting for anyone (mention them) or stuck on something that is preventing you
to move forward (as required)
Work-in-progress; what WIP pull request are you picking up
Up next; what is in your back-log, one or more items (optional)
Example
Template
The example and template provide a consistent format across all check-ins, reducing the cognitive overhead of scanning different formats for the client and other team members. Based on this example each line of the check-in has:
single bullet (Option-8 on a mac)
type of check-in line
the title of the issue/pull-request
optionally the person you are pairing with
the link to the issue/pull-request; starting on a new line
As the title of the issue/pull-request is the key component of a check-in line, these titles need to be descriptive.
Options
Check-in's work as an excellent checklist for the day. If you wish to mark things completed in your checklist throughout the day feel free to replace the • with a ✔︎ for completed issues and ➽ for work in progress.
During the day
GitHub issues/pull-requests drives our work. When working, we can always reference an issue on GitHub. Our workflow encourages creating an issue, marking it "in progress" and converting it to a pull-request when we have our first commit.
End of the day
To help close out your day, it's worth preparing for this 15 minutes before you would like to finish. This allows you to plan your exit without feeling rushed and provides some time for reflection and consider what you would like to accomplish tomorrow. There are two key actions to complete at the end of your day:
Push to GitHub
Check-out in Slack
Push to GitHub
Push all code at the end of the day to GitHub, even if it's a work in progress (commit with a WIP message). This practice provides:
a back-up of your work
you a sense of closure for the day
the opportunity for another team member to pick-up the pull request if you need to
take leave unexpectedly (e.g. sick leave; and you won't need to worry about pushing code
while your unwell)
an indicator of progress to your client
Our work goes beyond writing code; often there are activities of research and discovery. These are documented in issues as well. If the results of these activities haven't been already documented during your workday, your end of the day wind-down provides an opportunity to do so.
Check-out on Slack
As we work in different time-zones, it's essential that we check-out on Slack at the end of the day. The format for a checkout is slightly different from our check-ins.
Blockers; are you waiting for anyone (mention them) or stuck on something that is preventing you
to move forward (as required)
Completed; what issue was completed and what state is it in (waiting for review, merged)
Work-in-progress; what issue is in progress, _a brief description is required for the work
done that day_
Example
Template
Based on this example each line of the check-in has:
single bullet (Option-8 on a mac)
status
the title of the issue/pull-request
the status of issue/pull-request
optionally the person you paired with
optionally description text, required for
in-progressissuesthe link to the issue/pull-request; starting on a new line
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