Advice for Future Process Groups

This section will describe our views and experiences, and what we found out that worked. Previous advice can be found here.

The Process in General

  • The project is everyone's, the process and PO group does not have more authority than everyone else, just more responsibility.
  • Take your time to understand the process and project and read the wiki. It is time well spent.
  • Use the process exactly as we have described it on this wiki and then modify it to your liking. This is to avoid confusion about what to do.
  • Use Gitflow, as described in the wiki.
  • Be aware of the process changing and make an active decision about what to do.
  • Use the tools provided on this wiki and improve them for yourselves and the next years.
  • Use some time at the end of your project making it ready to hand off to the next year.

Communication

  • Use Discord or Slack as the communication medium. Use it to broadcast event start times and deadlines.
    • Have a channel dedicated to announcements to make sure important messages does not get lost in the general chat.
  • Events should be held at a physical or remote location with all developers present.
    • We strongly recommend physical meetings.
    • Start the meeting with the agenda. Remind people what the purpose is. Do this every time.
    • Take short breaks between the different activities to keep the groups focused.
    • If you do activities in smaller groups eg. Retrospective, remember to keep the groups small (<8) if you can. This prevents people from hiding behind others who speaks the entire time.
  • Keep things transparent. Files should be public and so should the thoughts behind process changes.
  • Respond to questions in timely manner. Do not be condescending or hostile in your answers.
    • You need to repeat a lot of information because people will forget or be confused.
  • Always be clear on what you say. Do not expect people to understand you implicitly.
  • Discuss the responsibilities of the process and PO group with the other developers at the start of the project.
    • Maybe try discussing the responsibilities before choosing who is process and PO group.

Keeping an Overview

  • Create a calendar available for all the groups in the project. Fill the calendar with all dates and times planned from the start.
  • Decide where all your documents should be stored and be sure to be transparent with the other developer teams with the documents.
  • Find an effective way to monitor and handle pull requests and reviews. We used Google Sheets and GitHub's API to automate it.
  • Clean up branches after every sprint. Delete those that weren't deleted when merging and make sure every branch has a purpose.
  • Decide if you want META-groups, which are groups focused on different aspects of the project such as front-end, back-end, server, and security.
Last update: September 18, 2024