Information gathering

Introduction

There is a time in the life of every developer, where they have to look for additional information to do their job. This article will guide you on what to do if these researches will most likely take more time than what seems appropriate for your task.

We differentiate between two possible scenarios. In the first one you have a task and need to do a little research to do that task. In the second scenario you have a basic problem with the used technologies and want to search for a better basis to do some things.

First scenario: Research for your task

This scenario you will encounter the most. You get a task to do from a ticket, and you don't know how to do that task yet. So you will do some research. No problem, just go ahead. But there are some things you have to do after you did that research.

  1. Inform your team in the daily standup.
  2. Document your findings, the best place is the developer guide. Here you can put short descriptions of your problem and how to solve it or just put some useful links here.
  3. Present your findings to your team or every developer. The best time for this presentation is either the sprintreview or an extra event

Second scenario: New technologies

We all know that new is always better, but sadly we don't have the time to implement all the cool new things that are out there. This means we have to selectively try to implement the best things. Now you say "I read of this cool new thing. How can I try it out and call it work?" Fret not here is a short guide how you can just do that.

  1. Inform our CTO Tobias Schifftner of your intentions and ideas. Use this small checklist to send him the most important information:
    1. How did you hear about this technology?
    2. Why do you want to learn more about this technology?
    3. What problem can we as a company solve?
    4. Do you want to just read about this solution or do you want to test it out?
    5. Do you need some funding to test it out?
    6. How much time do you think you need to learn enough?
  2. If the idea seems good. The next step is to inform Pascal Kunz, so he can decide together with Tobias S., if the time investment is okay.
  3. What to do after you finish your research
    1. Document your findings
    2. Inform Tobias Schifftner to decide if and how to implement your findings in our future works
    3. Present your findings to all developers
    4. Extend the developer guide
  4. Start your project

Outro

Now that you know how to deal with information gathering, you should not have to worry about this ever again.