I helped my team to write a Dev Charter
(1 minute reading time)
A little while ago I’d noticed that even though the devs on the GOV.UK Forms team are all great both as individuals and as a group, there were certain things I realised weren’t generally agreed upon and I’d assumed would be.
This was perhaps because the team and project were still relatively new compared to the now tween-aged GOV.UK.
I’d been in sessions in the past where a team would come up with a charter, but never one specific for a group of devs before. I decided to run a workshop for just that on our Away Day.
Was pleasantly surprised that Mural had a Team Charter template. I was even more pleased to see so much engagement and activity when we got stuck into the session itself. Many virtual Post-Its were flying around on my screen!
Once we collated the cards into themes, I was able to distill them into the values you can see below. You can grab a PDF copy of it.
It’s great that the team came up with so much and have the commitment to follow the principles on the charter.
Core values
- We maintain a supportive culture
- What we build is accessible
- We progress our learning and development
- We write code of high quality
- We are led by user needs
Group norms
- We test test test!
- We prioritise reviewing to help ship things
- We favour simplicity over complexity
- We follow the standards
- We pair
- We are kind and empathetic
Quality of standards
- We write well defined and complete success criteria
- We are good reviewers
- We keep it simple
- We maintain a clear history
- We automate the repetitive