Having a Way of Working

[swatts]

Hello Lovelies,

As I was beginning to think about the organisation of the User Group Track at NIDays London in November and I got the news that we would now have to pay £250 to attend. Well that's saved me some work then.....................

This here article is just a summary of the points we were trying to get across in our NIWeek 2017 presentation that you can see below.

The goal of the presentation was stated thusly

To try and encourage software teams to have a “way”, and to base this way on good clinical decision making.

I can only really draw on my own experiences so we give a load of examples on how we do stuff at SSDC.

We discussed Project Management, Issue Tracking, Version Management and Document Management. But we could only employ some of the short cuts shown because we have a way of working. By "Way of Working" I mean that the 4 software engineers in SSDC all work the same way, we have a common methodology and a common process and we refine these as we go.

This way may not be the best way, but 4 people working together will always beat 4 geniuses working individually.

One aspect wasn't really covered in the slide set and that is the human part of this. How do you get it to work. For us we issue track everything including our processes, templates, tools and documents. We are also very democratic, I tend to lead the discussion but as grumpy old men the others tend to brutally shoot down anything that doesn't make sense. Describing the "why" of a thing is also a necessity. As an example.

If you cannot describe why something should be done, perhaps it shouldn't be done.

If you have any questions on the presentation stick them in the comments.

Lots of Love

Steve