Culture and Norms

Our teams core values

• Veteran's first - always consider if what you are working on provides value to Veterans.
• Help others - how can you elevate others.
• Be a thoughtful and trusted partner to the VA and their contractors: treat others as you would like to be treated.
• Look to make small, incremental improvement: fail (learn) fast if needed.
• Enjoy your work: be proactive, flexible, resourceful and curious.
• Make the team be a safe place: demonstrate kindness, empathy, respect, trust, care and assume best intentions.

Proposed Norms

Starting some proposals for consensus:

• Document Coding Patterns that should be followed, especially if it follows best practices. The LHDI Starter Kit provides some initial code but we don't have to follow it if it causes undue friction.
• Document DevOps How-To's for developers, such as Deploy to Dev and Deploy to Prod. Application developers don't need to know all the details; provide a "Quickstart" guide with references to relevant code, script, and/or configuration files. Document it once and reference it so you don't have to re-explain.
• Document DevOps details that may be useful for others or demonstrate how to get the details, such as Kubernetes clusters.
• Document available tools, such as DataDog monitoring, for diagnostics, monitoring, or reporting.
• Document learnings or tips that takes a while to figure out, such as Docker containers (because it is involved in development and deployment) or your Development process, to help your teammates learn and include notes to remind your future self.
• Radiate intent because we want to get things done quickly and openly.
• When someone other than the Product Manager creates a ticket for the backlog they should post a slack message in the team channel with a link to the ticket tagging the Product Manager. The ticket creator should indicate their opinion on the priority level of the ticket in the slack message. If the ticket creator feels the ticket should be worked on in the current sprint, they should state this in the slack message and seek agreement from the Product Manager before starting. Tickets should be created for most work that a team member performs that takes 1 or more hour of time so the team can get credit for the work completed.