We are glad to have you join us. To set up the project, read the Getting Started guideline in the readme.
As a new member of the team, you should have access to the listed tools. If you have not been invited to any, then reach out to your technical team lead (TTL) for access.
- Pivotal Tracker (PT)
- Calendar invites to meetings
- standup_alice Slack bot
- Access to the GitHub repository
As a new member of the team, you should be assigned a tech buddy who should help you navigate the project in the first few weeks. Therefore, don't feel shy to ask them for help when you can't make head or tail of how things flow in the project.
You should also be given a live demonstration (a.k.a demo) of the project, either by your TTL or tech buddy. This should be arranged when you are being onboarded into the team. If this step is skipped, please communicate to your TTL about it.
To understand our workflow, read the workflow document.
In the ART team, we work in pairs when implementing features. This implies that pair programming is a core process in our workflow. Therefore, we will pair you with a person who has been on the team for a while in your initial tasks. Occasionally, you will work on your own when:
- Working on 1 point feature tasks that are straight forward
- Fixing bugs
- Implementing chore tasks
As part of the workflow, you have to estimate the feature tasks assigned to you. Ensure that your estimation covers:
- Any research/learning you have to do in order to implement the task
- The time it takes to review the pull request (PR)
Developers estimate their own tasks as we realized that there was huge discrepancy between the amount of time it took to complete a task and the estimation done by the project manager. To mitigate this, we introduced the concept of estimating the tasks that you are to work on in order to ensure the estimations are within reasonable range when compared to the actual time taken. This also helps developers get an overall understanding of a problem, and identify ambiguity in the description that has to be clarified before starting the actual coding.
NOTE: The estimation should cover everything that is needed to ge a task to the "DONE" state, which is basically the task being accepted in PT. This includes research time, the implementation time, the review time, e.t.c.
When doing estimations, remember that a 1 point task should be completed within 2 days.
Read the retro notes pinned in the #art-frontend-masters Slack channel for 25th September and 16th October, 2018; to understand what was discussed about breaking down tasks, estimating, pair programming, and making small PRs.
Always refer to the code organization and conventions documents when writing code.