Today is February 5th, the third day after the Spring Festival holiday. In order to cope with the outbreak, many Internet companies have turned on the remote working mode. Not knowing how well the teams telecommuted in the first two days, our Management team at Worktile started discussing telecommuting on the fourth day of the New Year and prepared for any problems that might arise. According to the actual execution in the past two days, the R&D team I work for has performed well and has not been affected significantly. So we want to share with you some of our thoughts, preparations and practices about telecommuting.

To start with, I am the head of Worktile’s basic platform department, which includes the platform group responsible for core component development and the operation and maintenance group responsible for online and internal server management. Our operation and maintenance team has always been a distributed team, including members in Beijing and Hangzhou. I have worked in multinational companies for several years before, so I am no stranger to remote work. I’d like to talk a little bit about how telecommuting is implemented by our Worktile team.

Define principles for telecommuting

First of all, as a director of r&d line, I first defined a principle of telecommuting for myself — trust, and trust from the top down. That is to say, telecommuting requires managers, whether the COMPANY’S CEO or ordinary team leader, to fully trust their team members are responsible, responsible, able to consciously complete tasks on time and quality, and able to take the initiative to communicate problems in the work. Only with this trust can telecommuting take place. Otherwise, it is a dangerous situation of surveillance, control and suspicion. So trust is the foundation of telecommuting.

Second, managers at any level should lead by example. We expect our team members to work as if they were in the office, but even more so as managers. For example, when Worktile defines the online time for telecommuting, we need to ensure that our Manager has an unblocked communication channel during this period. We asked for daily meetings of the members, and the Manager would try to participate in these meetings (it may not be necessary to speak but must participate); We require all the company to write daily papers during this period and define the visible scope. Manager’s daily papers must be open to team members.

Set the rules for telecommuting carefully

With this trust in mind, we have to be very careful about the implementation of telecommuting. We say “careful” because we clearly recognize that rules are not for monitoring and restraint, but for the most efficient communication and cooperation, and to minimize the cost of remote communication. So we try to make the rules as few and simple as possible. Here are Worktile’s rules for telecommuting:

  1. Be on time: Ensure team members can communicate in real time.
  2. Clear communication channels: Worktile, wechat, mobile phone, video conference.
  3. Daily Scrum: Since our entire r&d team operates using Scrum, we use the Daily Scrum as a Daily routine.
  4. Daily: submitted by all staff (including CEO, CTO, etc.), visible within the department, reviewed by the department director.
  5. In addition, we recommend that Scrum masters be held by department heads or senior members of the team during the telecommuting period, especially in the early stages, rather than the Scrum Master rotation rule that has always been in place. This is mainly due to the fact that the remote early Scrum Master is likely to need to coordinate more resources in the company, and senior Scrum members are more likely to be able to solve problems quickly because they have been with the company longer.

For example, the following is the daily work paper I submitted yesterday (February 4th). The reviewer is CTO, which is visible to the members of our department.

Preparations. It’s not too late to start

Unlike lines of business, r&d requires more tools, software, services and resources. After telecommuting, we sorted out the resources that the R&D team might use daily and evaluated and prepared one by one. If your team is currently experiencing problems with remote access to resources, check out our list and resolve them one by one.

  1. Issue reminders for telecommuting. We try to communicate telecommuting considerations in terms of reminders rather than rules, based on the basic principle of trust that I discussed at the beginning of this article. For example, the picture below shows the wechat group information of our department on February 2, the day before telecommuting started.

  1. Notify team members to prepare the necessary software (accounts). For example, notify team members to download and update Zoom for video conferencing, and purchase enough Pro accounts if necessary; Tencent documents for document collaboration; Confirm that all members of Worktile group and wechat group in the department join and enable push.
  2. Ensure that the company’s IT resources can be accessed externally. For example, open enterprise VPN, open IP whitelist for related R&D servers, and expand the capacity of some highly dependent servers in advance.

Worktile r&d team remote working practices

Each team works differently, so the problems and solutions to telecommuting are different. I’m just trying to put this in perspective by showing how our Worktile team works in a telecommuting scenario.

The arrangements for the meeting

All of our previous meeting schedules were synchronized through the Worktile schedule. With the Worktile schedule, we can not only arrange the meeting time, participants and feedback information of participants, but also view all the meeting schedules of the current team. In the case of telecommuting, we more clearly defined the principle of “Worktile schedule shall prevail”, that is, any meeting shall be organized through Worktile to avoid the asynchronism of multiple schedule information such as phone calls and wechat.

For example, the following chart shows our telecommuting schedule, including Sprint Plan, Daily Scrum, architectural design review, management meeting, etc.

Below are the details of our Daily Scrum schedule. The only difference is that, for better communication across the department, we extended the Daily Scrum to a Daily work meeting while telecommuting by bringing in members of another group (which is not currently using Agile).

Video conference

One of the main tools that telecommuting relies on is videoconferencing. This meeting format is familiar due to previous work. For the rest of the team who have not experienced this kind of meeting, I made some special requests in advance.

  1. Turn off the camera. This is not only to reduce unnecessary bandwidth usage, but also to keep attendees focused on the meeting itself. Telecommuting, especially if you work from home these days, can mean that people dress differently, decorate their rooms differently, and so on. Turning on the camera is a big distraction. So my first request is that all attendees turn off their cameras.
  2. Control the microphone. After entering the meeting, members should keep their microphones off to prevent the interference of various noises in the meeting. Turn on the microphone if you need to speak, and turn it off after you finish speaking. Another benefit of this specification is that it minimizes the need for multiple people to talk at once. Because it’s easy to tell who the speaker is in a face-to-face meeting, it’s not easy to tell who the speaker is in a remote meeting. So try to keep only one or two speakers in the meeting.
  3. Make full use of shared screens. Almost all video apps now have screen-sharing capabilities, and when combined with SaaS tools like Worktile, the effect is almost indistindistant from a face-to-face meeting. In addition, you can use Remote Control flexibly, and let other members Control the currently shared screen if necessary for easy discussion.

Below is our Daily Scrum meeting at 10am today. We held meetings by Zoom, Scrum masters shared their screens, and the Worktile Agile showed the taskboard of the current iteration, with each member taking turns to open and speak.

The following is an architectural design and code review session conducted by our team yesterday. Again, through Zoom. The organizer initiated and shared the screen. During the meeting, some members controlled the organizer’s screen through the function of Remote Control and put forward design questions and suggestions.

Collaborative document

In addition to videoconferencing software, we collaborate with some collaborative document coordination and some instant messaging tools. For example, in our Work plan meeting of R&D department in February, we used Tencent documents and wechat groups to complete the content of the plan form together in the process of discussion.

Coordination of work tasks

Worktile is the basis of our team’s daily work. Since the R&D team is made up of programmers, even though we worked in the same workspace before, we preferred to communicate with each other through the online function of Worktile. Use Worktile’s instant messaging to briefly discuss issues, comment on development tasks, and so on.

When you switch to telecommuting, the flow and the way you work doesn’t change much. It’s just gone from texting and commenting at the office to everyone texting and commenting at home.

Below is a discussion of some minor issues on Worktile after our architectural design review this afternoon.

The picture below shows us communicating product details through comments on a user story in development. The advantage of comments is that the process and results of communication can be preserved on the user story for future reference.

Code submission and code review

Worktile’s Code has always been hosted on Github, so telecommuting has had no impact on writing Code, submitting Code, and doing Code reviews. The only effect may be that the Internet speed in individual members’ homes is not strong enough.

For the case of the company’s own managed code warehouse, such as building a private Gitlab warehouse, IT must be prepared by the IT department in advance to access the Internet, or open the enterprise VPN. If you use the SaaS version of the repository, as we do, you don’t need any preparation at all.

By the way, I have a feeling that this telecommuting will make the adoption of SaaS tools more obvious to many enterprises.

The picture below is our Code Review on Github. This is an approach we’ve used before, and it works just as well in telecommuting scenarios.

CI/CD

CI/CD doesn’t have much to do with telecommuting, but it would be helpful if our r&d department had a complete pipeline in place. We know that communication and collaboration between R&D and operations has always been a problem, and the introduction of the assembly line is to solve this problem. Before working together, this communication problem might not be so obvious, but now the R&D team and operation and maintenance team work remotely. With the support of this stable assembly line, on the one hand, a lot of communication costs can be saved (the r&d submits the code and deploys directly). On the other hand, it also ensures the quality of products through automation (various tests integrated by various assembly lines).

The diagram below shows Worktile’s own pipeline execution information. All members of the team can see it, and the entire team is notified of trial failures via Worktile messages.

Online deployment and maintenance

Although we have an automated pipeline, due to the particularity of the online environment, we still deploy the online environment by manually triggering the pipeline. Due to the unique nature of our team, we have already built an online deployment application platform and an online data survey platform through Worktile.

When deployment is required, the R&D team applies for deployment through this platform, and operation and maintenance personnel approve the deployment at the corresponding time. The benefits are not only less frequent communication, but also formalized, compliant, and traceable deployment operations.

Below is our online deployment requisition.

A little personal advice

In view of the principle of trust and the principle of minimization I mentioned before, we have almost no requirements for the R&D team’s personal work life, such as pretending to swipe the card in front of the door before starting work, and wearing work clothes instead of home clothes, as mentioned online. Because we trust our colleagues to do their jobs well, whether at home or at work, in pajamas or not.

Our only advice is to keep your work life as separate as possible. That is, don’t engage in family activities while you are at work, but simply interact with your family during breaks and while you are fetching water.

conclusion

Here’s a list of what our Worktile team has learned from telecommuting over the past few days, as well as some of the preparations we’ve made. Hopefully, what we’ve mentioned will help more r&d teams implement remote work smoothly.

Again, I think telecommuting is about people and requires a responsible, self-driven leader and team. At the same time, it needs to be based on the premise of full trust, not only the leader’s trust in employees, but also the trust between team members and between teams.

Finally, rational and flexible use of various tools is the foundation to help us collaborate effectively. Not just when we telecommute, but when we return to the office in the near future. We hope that each enterprise can improve the execution, cohesion and efficiency of our R&D team through this practice opportunity of telecommuting.

Author profile: Ziyan Xu, Chief Architect & R&d Director of Worktile, former Microsoft Senior Project Manager, Microsoft MVP, author of Real Windows Azure, 15 years of software development experience, including architecture design, development and testing of enterprise software. Familiar with server-side development technology CNode.js and associated frameworks (ASP.NET, Express, Web sockets, etc.) and databases (SQL Server, MongoDB), caching and message queues (Redis, RabbitMQ)Copy the code


Worktile’s official website: worktile.com/

Author: Ziyan Xu, Chief architect of Worktile

This article was first published on Worktile’s official blog.