Friday, May 7, 2010

Inducting A New Employee (Software Developer)

In India there are two category of companies the big ones like Infosys, Wipro, TCS etc. who have considerable strength in their training departments and thus can layout training regimens that make the new joinee confortable. These companies have enough bench strength too, that allows ample time for a person to get up to speed. On the other hand are the majority of smaller size companies which cannot afford such a setup but still have to perform equal complexity tasks on tight schedules and resources.

I am now a days part of an organization which falls in the second category. We aim to quickly provide all data for the individual to start contributing. Apart from the talk that HR provides to the new joinee related to organizational rules and procedures, this is how my company goes about it:

  • A peer points the new person to where the code of the product , important files (like use cases or task breakups or decision analysis) are on the version control system. He also tells the person the softwares used and their versions. He is also pointed to a document which lists the same. In case there is a difference the new joinee has the responsibility to update it, get it reviewed and commit to version control.

  • A senior person gives the new new joinee an overview of the product and its functionality.

  • He also explains the structure and organization of the product modules and classes and answers any immediate questions. The process of code review or unit tests and software development process followed by the team are also explained.

  • With this background we give around one week to the individual to go through the existing code base. During this time he can ask any question to the Senior Developer who has the responsibility to answer or get the answers.

  • What we find is that by the end of the week the new joinee is comfortable navigating the project and now he is assigned a few bugs in his area of future working and he is soon up to speed.

  • Once this is done the next stage is to assign tasks as any other experienced Developer on the team.
  • No comments:

    Post a Comment