Policy

Many business owners are recognizing the value of utilizing a remote workforce. This can be a particularly effective employment structure for those who want to put together a team of remote developers. To ensure this type of setup will work for your business, make sure you have all of your operational functions in order prior to interviewing candidates, hiring staff, or launching operations.

From experiencing organizations ranging from 10-person start-ups to dozens-of-thousands-of-people organizations, I have found a consistent experience among shared service providers. They say “no.” A lot.

A brief lengthy rant follows on what adoption of the “Scaled Agile Framework” (SAFe) indicates in 2020. For a more comprehensive blow-by-blow of how SAFe is deficient, head over to google. This focuses on the indicators related to the selection of SAFe and not the framework itself.

Work on the remote handbook template continues, though it’s in a state now where an interested party can go to https://handbook.brownfield.dev and use the link on the home page to download a GitLab import to start their very own project.

Organizations with policies established during a time where colocation was the only way to work are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to suddenly remote productivity. The work from home lifestyle of taking a day to send a few emails but mostly be unproductive was begrudgingly accepted as an infrequent quality of life boost. Reversing that trend, during a pandemic, with kids home and elevated stress levels, it’s going to be tough.

Agile software development has revolutionized the way private sector organizations build software. The primary tenets are that all companies are software companies, software is never done, and requirements always change. What does that mean for the federal space?

GitLab’s developers use a pull workflow so the assigned field is editable by anyone. The intended worfklow is to leave the issue unassigned (though tagged for a team) and when a developer is ready, they assign it to themself and work on it. Assignment is seen as a “leave this alone if it’s not you” sort of signal rather than “someone wants me to get this done.”

Brownfield organizations typically have policies that were written under a very different development paradigm and create more problems than they solve under current Agile and DevOps practices.