GSoD 2020 - Documentation for New Developers: Priorities for phase II

@rainbow are you able to find @florianrappl via slack, kindly tag me too in the call discussion for coming a up with a microfront end documentation for getting started

I 've sent him a slack message. Will include you for sure.

@herbert24 @grace @jennifer @ibacher @dkayiwa Based on your input, I have created a new wiki page hierarchy for the ā€œGetting started as a developerā€ part. Itā€™s here

Some of the titles are for files that do not yet exist. The titles that have links already exist but live elsewhere on wiki The yellow titles are files Iā€™ve updated.

Please provide your thoughts and comments. Thanks!

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@rainbow Iā€™ve added some suggestions to the Getting Started as a Developer google doc, namely to address these top problems Iā€™ve been noticing (@madhens I think it would be awesome to incorporate these into our general onboarding in the future; but for now we should probably include these in the dev onboarding so people donā€™t miss out on this info):

  • Encouragement to join active projects: Devs seem overwhelmed by our curated intro tickets. They either donā€™t know where to find them, or thereā€™s too much to learn for them to get started contributing to them. Better practice would be to plug contributors into small teams of people working on things theyā€™re interested in, so that they build some community relationships and quickly have a small support system of people.
  • Where to find info about our events: It amazes me that even though most people use digital calendars to structure their lives, some people who have been around OMRS for years and years still rely totally on Talk to know what meetings/events are going on. How hectic! Letā€™s help newcomers know where and how they can join meetings and conversations already going on. For example, I recently joined the DHIS2 community online, and couldnā€™t find how to join their meetings/calls/events - so I gave up.

Feel free to edit/cut down my writing!

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The next thing that would be awesome for us to do for intro Devs is an easy way for them to get started writing some automated tests for our user-facing product. FYI Weā€™re working on a prioritized list of test needs (covered/not covered) that new devs could be directed to, but weā€™re not there yet.

Finally, FYI @rainbow and @madhens I added an extremely extremely light version of onboarding to the Active Projects page on the Wiki, because we learned that some companies (like ThoughtWorks) are referencing this page and their devs/UX/BAs were getting confused almost right away. It would be awesome to see the Personas, Site Example video from Nepal, and Community Video all included as part of the general onboarding that everyone goes through :slight_smile: Does that make sense?

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I think it would be ideal to have a ā€œGetting Started with QAā€ guide to which we direct BAs, testers, and devs who want to focus on QA. Since we also want to make QA an integral part of the dev process, it would also be good to have a way to orient devs to our QA processes and tools. Could this be a short ā€œAbout QAā€ section with a link to our QA pages thatā€™s included in the ā€œGetting Started as a Developerā€ guide?

This also brings us back to the question about tickets/tasks and where those live. Itā€™s important to have consistent guidance for teams and squads about where to put their intro tickets/tasks and how we direct people to them. With the previous Getting Started as a Developer guide, the intro tickets were a part of the guide. I think it will be easier to maintain if squads simply tag any intro tickets in JIRA, on github issues, Trello, etc and provide a link to those who want to join a squad or team.

What do others think?

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Iā€™m about to go into a block of afternoon meetings but I think having specific ā€˜Getting Startedā€™ information for the core teams makes a lot of sense, and for QA, tying it closer to Development could really simplify it instead of having QA both as a separate page and then part of the Developers page.

And I fully agree on the squads having a link to their Jira/Trello/etc tagged with good beginner issues on their ā€˜Get Startedā€™ page, so it perpetually keeps itself current. Obviously, depends on if this is useful to the squad leads, but it seems much more intuitive from the viewpoint of a new user.

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I would love to write instructions on that. Who should I talk to get more info? Will a link to existing unit test wiki be enough?

I will revise the instruction and put more emphasis on active projects! Great insight.Thanks!

3 posts were split to a new topic: Request for Comment: New Volunteer Guide