edX more involved in debugging issues found during testing

better testing setups

• share data used for testing earlier - we eventually got there with Disco, but could have avoided a lot of back and forth earlier

better testing coverage

• bugs found that were not covered by any tests

spend more time up front identifying acceptance criteria from stakeholders - some of those appeared late in the process for Disco

In hindsight, as the edX-side reviewer for Disco, I wish I had spent more time really understanding the new code base. Going forward, we don’t have much internal expertise with es7 or this specific code. That would take up a lot more of my time, but still.

A more clear hand-off at which point new changes should be made by edX to get edx.org working.

Figure out how to get external engineers better access to a working testing environment

daily standups on the status of things in slack channel

throwing bugs over the wall +1

Under-estimating how long things take

Context switching so heavily

• context is lost when things get blocked and people get pulled off on other things

weekly sync meetings

Having time when all engineers are online.

work on smaller services first, then tackle the bigger, complex ones later

focus on getting the smaller victories to keep momentum

back-and-forth discussion including data and queries to help narrow into debugging problems

+1 write tests to cover bugs that we found so that they can be covered for future development

keep maintaining tests that we do have

slack channel and open lines of communication for discussing issues, bugs

not putting a lot of pressure on Raccoon Gang

• focus on being supportive and helpful

keep Raccoon Gang involved in discussions of ES7 work