What now? A real Agile experience. But not just that.
You have been onboarded, so what will you be working on?
Moravio has many projects. It uses different tools. Mostly you'll be following an industry-standard Scrum methodology, to begin with, but with much more direct contacts than a big corporation.
To begin with, teams are very small. Communication is easy, there are few managers in the whole company and the point is not micro-manage people but let them do their work.
The main used work-tracking system is Jira. It is well-known, full of plugins to facilitate the life of developers, it's stable and powerful.
Jira is used across the company in many projects. Having said so, the management is always trying to find ways to make life easier for their colleagues, whether finding better ways to use some tool, or testing and implementing some new one.
We follow an agile methodology, but without making it an excuse to overload the workers because they "have to be flexible". If you work with some client, Moravio is backing you up in not having not wanted overtime, or continuing change of requirements.
Flexibility is good, but not at the cost of ruining a life.
An Agile methodology experience meets the demands of having improvements and changing priorities according to the needs.
Processes are documented in Confluence, and they are not so many, so they're easily accessible.
Normally, in a team, there are the well know Scrum meetings like refinement or grooming, Sprint planning and retrospective, and others, but keeping them at bay. The point is not to have half of the working week in meetings.
Another interesting aspect is that not everyone works on the same project, and therefore uses the same tools. Sometimes clients have different internal systems to work with. For example, a different tracking hours system; another CI/CD toolset, or even a ticketing system.
All this brings a wider perspective on what Moravio can use for itself. This shared knowledge (not touching, of course, the private and sensitive client data) helps contribute to having a better, easier way to handle tools in the company.
It doesn't stop there
Every project allows a developer to gain experience. But the knowledge can't stop there. There are two main ways to deepen - or widen, depending on the case - a developer horizon. Both ways are important for a good dev experience in a company.
The first one is nowadays a classic within IT companies: offer a budget to spend for education, whether through books, courses, or conferences.
The second one is more peculiar. Offer a 1-hour meeting (called Level-up) every Friday to let somebody inside the company present a topic of interest.
That means discussing various topics:
- presenting what we do inside a project,
- explaining unit tests,
- focusing on some aspects of programming
- or user testing some applications.
Not only it's useful to learn a little about all these aspects, but it also helps each one who is presenting to develop soft skills for making a good -hopefully, not boring - and accurate presentation for the colleagues. And it incentivizes discussion and knowing what each other is doing in a normal working day life.