Let's start your second week off right!
So, you made it through your first week! And you came back for week 2! Yay! Of course you did! We continue the onboarding emails this week, as we jump into the wonderful world of Standards and Practices, Project Management methodologies, and time tracking. Read on!
Standards and Practices Meetings
As a member of the global technology community, BWTC takes life-long learning and proactive improvement of our skill sets seriously. To that end, we have implemented monthly meetings centered around learning from and sharing knowledge with each other. Among the flurry of Google calendar invites you will receive in the coming days, you will be added to the recurring event labeled “BW Developer Connect Meeting.” Twice per month, the developers at BWTC meet for an hour to learn either a new standard (these are mandatory and we all must adopt them) or a best practice (BWTC’s approved method of doing something related to our job.) These make it easier for developers to get their bearings when they hop onto a project, and help everyone keep their skills sharp. An example of a standard at Bitwise Tech Consulting is our code review process, and an example of a best practice is how we use React Native.
All of the developers who work for BWTC are encouraged to contribute to our joint learning by volunteering to present at one of these meetings, writing and submitting code to our Standards & Practices repository, or by helping someone with a particularly complicated problem when asked. All of us should at some point contribute to the learning of another BWTC developer. Take some time to look over the repository and review our past presentations.
While these meetings will generally be developer-focused, we invite anyone in the BW family to drop in and participate. You are highly encouraged to participate actively by leading a meeting on a topic of your choice. Ask Sonia Rohani, or Joel (Gyuhun Lee) to add you to the GCal event so that you get reminders and emails.
How projects are run
SCRUM. Lean. XP. Kanban. Six Sigma. Waterfall. FDD. RAD. Spiral Model. WTF.
That last one wasn't an actual project model - that was me, literally saying "WTF" to all that mess!
Here at BWTC, you'll never catch us referring to ourselves as practicing any particular capital-M methodology. Rather, we practice software development the same way Bruce Lee practiced Jeet Kune Do.
Wait, Bruce who? Jeet what? Let me explain.
Bruce Lee was an accomplished martial artist who went on to have a film career in the 60s and 70s. Some say he was the greatest martial artist of all time. I don't know about that, but he was certainly the most influential, and also took a very interesting approach to his craft.
At a time when style vs style arguments were raging in the martial arts world - "which is better, wrestling or boxing? Muay Thai or Wing Chun? Judo or Karate?" - Bruce Lee created a martial arts style that consisted of "use whatever technique, from whatever martial art, that will be effective in the moment". So, if a situation calls for a western-boxing-style punch, a Judo-style harai goshi, or a Muay-Thai-style plum clinch, that's what you use, regardless of whatever style you say you practice.
And so it is with BWTC. As a consulting firm, we service projects across multiple industries, in multiple ways - fixed-bid Ag projects, hourly-billable Legal projects, do-not-exceed NGO projects. We do this NOT by trying to force every project to fit into some named methodology, but by doing as Bruce Lee did - "use whatever technique, from whatever project methodology, that will be effective in the moment".
If we feel that a project is best served with a SCRUM-style sprint, Waterfall-style big-planning-up-front, or XP-style pair-programming sessions, we do that. And if the next project is best served by using different techniques, well, we do that instead.
There are always certain "gates" that a project has to pass through - design, prototype, milestones, user acceptance, delivery signoff - and these remain consistent from project to project. That said, the desktop-level details of how a project gets executed and moved through those gates is ultimately up to the Team Lead of each project.
Does that seem oddly structureless? It's not. It's just the right amount of structure, combined with our expectation that everyone on the project demonstrates diligence, and turn adulthood up to 11. We hired you because we trust you to do your job, which includes exercising judgment regarding the way it gets done.
Welcome to the team and enjoy your first project!
On certain occasions we need to track time on our projects. Time and Materials (T&M) projects require us to track our time and what we did during those hours. We then bill for those projects based on the number of hours logged, so it's really important that we stay ahead of time tracking on those projects. We use Tick to track time, so if you haven't already, ask your manager to add you to Tick so that you can begin tracking your hours!