Working With CoverHound Engineers:

What to know about our working agreements

Core Hours: 10:30AM – 3:30PM

Engineers are expected to be available for communication through Slack, phone, or in person, and able to respond promptly (barring meetings) during these corehours. It is up to each individual engineer to determine what hours outside of those will make up the rest of their day.

Slack and Day-to-Day Communication

Please err on the side of messaging someone in Slack before approaching them in person. Engineering often requires deep thinking; interruptions and switching context can be a big setback.

Meetings

• If the team has an in-person standup, it’s important to be there and missing it should be an exception. Post your update in Slack if you can’t be there.
• Standup updates follow conventional “agile” format: what you did yesterday, what you’re doing today, and whether you have any blockers.
• Don’t get into in-depth discussions in the standup while there are still people waiting to give their updates.
• At in-team retrospectives, teams discuss the past cycle–what went well, what could go better, as well as any of the things mentioned for Engineering Retrospectives.

Issue Tracking

No summary on this one! Please read the whole document about the cycle, using Pivotal, stories, issues, and bugs.

Learning Time

Every other Friday afternoon, following a cycle’s engineering retro, is “learning” time for engineers. This is explicit time invested in developing their skills or working on something interesting that is of value to the team, such as a proof of concept refactor or spiking on a new technology or library we might want to use. Engineers should only be pulled away from learning time for critical production bugs or to meet external deadlines that wouldn’t otherwise be met.