albert's blog: Taking Over a Project

2011/08/04

Team

who? + characteristics + how long they work with the team + strong/weak points + maturity level / how independent they are? + maybe there is some BSC mechanism, if so, take a look at the previous records
language skills
contact - mail, skype/jabber nick etc.
working hours? anyone working half-time? anyone with unusual working hours?
where? one room or many places
some people from other teams involved? independent consultants? some project partners (external companies) that we cooperate with?
what are the roles of people
who knows what?
are team members involved in other projects?
questions to ask to each team member:
- what are you proud/angry/annoyed about? what (de)motivates you?
- please draw the architecture of the system
- please write down the "definition of done"
- what issues do you think we have? what is the most common source of bugs? which bugs are the most annoying for us / for clients?

internal (only the team is involved) - Scrum - daily / sprint / backlog ?
with clients
with higher-ups?
traveling? where? for how long?
how are the invitations send? who sends them? who sets the agenda? who sends minutes (if any)? who attends?
how long is the meeting? who participates?

SCM, FTP/WebDavs, Sonar, CI, bug tracker, artifacts repository, wiki
keystores, certificates
mailing lists (internal, external)
adresses, credentials, who creates accounts? who administrates?
environments - local, testing, production?
Can anyone, besides the team, access any of these (e.g. client reading bug tracker issues) ?

SCRUM? how does it really look like? how are user stories sized - hours or t-shirts (M, S, XL)? what meetings, how often etc., are daily standups held regularly
code reviews - formalized, informal, who does them? peer reviews? external audits of code?
any visualization tools? (well, these are the easiest to notice, aren't they?)
what is the "definition of done" of this team?
any special recruiting process for this team?
build process - automated?
How are versions/releases created? What is a naming pattern? Are there different internal (for team) and external (for client) versions? How can one learn about the changes between versions X and Y?
statuses of issues on issue tracker (e.g. todo, in progree, done, accepted etc.)
production deploy & rollback, tools used - Puppet, Liquidbase?
code conventions - format (Eclipse formatter?), checkstyle etc, but also use of TODO/FIXME tags in code
SCM (SVN/git) - branches? how/when created, when merged?
CI - schedules, how are they set?

unit
integration
end2end
does client test?
automation? which requirements functional and non functional are being automatically tested?
code coverage - how high, is it automatically calculated, is code coverage of different tests merged?

what we know? what are the main problems from our point of view? (e.g. internal code quality, our build process, client?), does client is aware of this?
recent problems, what were the causes, are they fixed?
what is the main concern of client?
common bugs, how many critical bugs, are they added to the current sprint?

communication - how do we communicate with clients? with whom exactly should I talk about certain topics? who has the right to make decisions?
communication - how does client communicates with us?
communication - what hours is he available? does he answer emails immediately?
what does he value, what are his goals?
does he own the code?
does he has a say in technologies we used, should we ask him for approval for new libraries/tools that we plan to use?
is it possible to negotiate the scope?