Distribution Team Training

Common links

• Distribution Team Handbook

Purpose

The purpose of team training is to introduce the work done to the rest of the team. It also allows the rest of the team to easily transition into new features and projects and prepare them for maintenance. Training is public and available for everyone wanting to get familiar with the topics.

Training should be:

• Providing a high level overview of the invested work
• Describing the main challenges encountered during development
• Explaining the possible pit-falls and specificities

Training should not be:

• Replacement for documentation
• Replacement for writing down progress in issues
• Replacement for follow up issues

Simply put, the training is a summation of: notes taken in issues during development, programming challenges, high level overview of written documentation. Your team member should be able to take over the maintenance or build on top of your feature with less effort after they have been part of the training.

Note Do not shy away from being technical in your training. You can ask yourself: What would have been useful for me when I started working on this task? What would have helped me be more efficient?

Efficiency of the training

In order to see whether the training is efficient, Distribution lead will rotate team members on projects where training was done. For example, if the feature requires regular releases, the person who gave the training will be considered a tutor. Different team member will follow the training and documentation and will ask the original maintainer for help. The new person responsible is now also responsible for improving the feature. They are now also responsible of training other team members.

Training Listings

• DIS001 GitLab Pivotal Cloud Foundry Tile
• DIS002 GitLab Terraform Module
• DIS003 Kubernetes
• DIS004 Omnibus
• DIS005 PG HA
• DIS006 GitLab QA project
• DIS007 Let’s Encrypt with the omnibus-gitlab package
• DIS008 GitLab Helm Chart Operator
• Contributor introduction to Omnibus-GitLab

FAQ

Q: Isn’t this double work? A: No. The training should be prepared while documenting the task.

Q: Won’t this slow me down? A: At the beginning, possibly. However, every hour of the training given will multiple the value of it by the amount of team members.

Q: Isn’t it more useful to let the team check out the docs and ask questions? A: In an ideal world, possibly. However, everyone has a lot of tasks assigned and they might not be able to go through the docs until they need to do something. This might be months later and you, as a person who would give the training, might not be able help efficiently anymore.