In the recent years the teams I work with have been flooded with freshers. The way the freshers worked on the projects in college and in professional world are worlds apart. Here are the 5 key process that I advise my team members to follow whenever they are assigned a task to work on in the project.
Time Estimation
Before working on a task provide an estimate of how long will it take to deliver this task. There are few ways to provide this task. The team should provide a manual on how to estimate the tasks. This estimate must be reviewed by the team. Poker planning sessions is where these estimates are validated in agile projects. Estimates need not be in hours always, it can be in story points too. It is very important for teams to establish the framework and guidelines for estimating tasks.
Cost Estimation
It is also useful to provide cost estimation in addition to time estimation. I have seen team members take their tasks more seriously when cost estimation is added and cost to deliver a task is tracked. Inducting a fiscal responsibility in projects is encouraged. The simple cost estimation would be to attach a flat rate to team members and multiply that by the time estimation.
Timeline
Mostly freshers tend to calculate the delivery date for their tasks by using simple date projection by adding hours and start date of the task. This is unrealistic in most cases as there are holidays, company events, training and providing on-going support for some jobs in production. Use calendar to project the end date for tasks.
Risks
Freshers should also learn how to assess different types of risks involved in delivering the tasks. Team should be maintaining a documentation of list of risks assessed so far in the project. The biggest risk as developer I face in working on legacy application is legacy bug. Sometimes I am not aware of the legacy bug that is present and prevents me from completing my task on time.
Status checks
Teams should establish status check processes whereby the team leader can track the status of the tasks. Work-breakdown structure is the best way to do it. If a task is simple and straight forward then attaching % of completion to work-breakdown makes sense but sometimes this is difficult to do.
If any of these needs revision when the task is in progress then it should be done immediately and communicated to the stakeholder. Good luck with these tips, hope this helps your team.
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