My remote working experience

Basic Info:

    A Team of 9 engineers: 1 Manager, 3 Senior engineer, 3 Junior - Intermediate engineer, 1 QA, 1 DBA

    Two groups of the team: each responsible for different but related projects

    Location: 2 at Canada and 7 at US, with 3 hours time difference

Tools:

      JIRA - Task management

      Slack - Problem discussion, Information notification

      ScreenHero - Pair programming

      Office 365 - Scheduling meetings, Inforamtion notification, emails

      Lifesize video conference -  Important and long meetings

What is our remote working mode like?

   1. Each sprint has 2 weeks.

   2. Every other Monday - sprint planning ( 1-1.5 hours): 

        - Create all tasks on JIRA, 

        - Make sure everyone know what themselves need to do and also what others do. 

        - Provide sufficient information for each tasks in jira. 

        - Every one should estimate the story points of each tasks and agree on one final points

        - Retrospective for last sprint: what doing good, what can we improve

   3. Every other Monday, should have 1:1 meeting with manager ( 15-30 minutes):

        - Share thoughts about ongoing projects. 

        - Talk about personal goals

        - Talk about company goals, department goals

        - Share company information

    4. Daily routine:

        - Stand up meeting: 

                 Ottawa time (13:30pm),  PA time(10:30am)

        - Don’t know what to do? 

                 Check jira

        - Still have problem understanding tasks? 

                 Slack senior engineers, mention specific person if possible

        - Code completed? 

                 Push to GitHub, attach PR link to related jira ticket

        - Have problems understanding code? 

                 ScreenHero to pair programming

        - Need support from other teams? 

                 File a ticket on jira

 

        - Not sure who to turn to? 

                 Ask manager, or check boarding information on jira wiki

        - Encounter tough problems? 

                 Office 365 to book a meeting room and schedule a meeting

        - How to take notes? 

                 Use Evernote for fragments and then use Jira wiki for well documenting.

        - Need to go offline for a while? 

                 Send a notification on Slack channel to inform all team members

        - How to start a day or end a day? 

                 Check Splunk/ELK log, check New Relic/DataDog dashboard for system monitoring.

                 File a ticket if found critical issues 

        - Ticket not responded by other teams?

                 Find the team and slack them directly, or ask manager to forward your problem.

   5. Good practices:

        - Update ticket if have some progress

        - Comment on ticket if finished part of your work

        - Talk to senior engineers in time if you are unsure about sth, don't hesitate

        - Should know how your team fit into the company goal, and how your team project related to other projects, should get more details

        - Get to know different people from different teams (no need to be good friends)

        - Read tech specs

        - Write more tech documents/blogs/specs

        - Know more DevOps tools