Discuss and finalize Department issues to present to Director–20210915-121710

Called a meeting to discuss department issues.

Important issues worth mentioning #

Maintenance #

1. Should be managed as projects
2. Code quality
   1. Writing tests
3. Investment on developers to improve code quality
4. Purpose of Code review and testing should be maintenance.
5. Someone should manage and lead this space
6. We have enough tools and systems to give us feedback
   1. Kibanapp
   2. Django Emailg
   3. We can add more service and integrations to make it easier.
7. Companies sell maintenance and give software for free
8. more than 60% of software cost
9. Depending on the number of issue
   1. poor code -> improve the code
   2. more resource -> assign more maintainers
10. Strategy and process

Responsiblities of operations, DevOps and Developers #

1. Operations

   1. Responsibilities of maintaining the services in production
   2. Machines

2. DevOps

   1. Automation of CI/CD pipline
   2. Creating configurations for internal and external services

3. Developers

   1. Code
   2. Bugs and errors in applications

UX/UI department is essential #

1. There function is not just to create HTML, CSS but there vital importance is in helping, Clients, Business Analyst, and Developers in the requirements.
2. This saves everybodies time: creating UX mocks up and freezing requirements is several order better than starting development right away.
   1. Expensive to implement feedback and change.
3. Client do not distinguish between UI/UX ehancements Making this distinction makes it easier for us.
4. Any software cannot replace this.

Project Management - Client management #

1. We should adopt agile, replacing water fall completely.
2. Client thinks default in Waterfall making the feedback of course correction longer, difficult and irrelevant.
3. Clients and our department relationship should based on collobartion based Intead of them just throwing requirements at us and showing there discontent after completion, rather than working with us, being available as needed, to create a successful solution.
4. Urgent projects that bypass our process
   1. Urgent lack of preparation from their part

Enhancements should be treated as new projects #

1. We mix ehancements and bugs(maintenance) together creating problems for ourselves.
2. New team, deadline, e.t.c.
3. Ehancements are difficutl than greenfield, new, projects, completing them successfully takes more effort.
4. Explain cost of ehancements, time, to client and prioritize.

Being careful Techonolgies we support #

we should make decision of supporting technologies and frameworks thoughtfully and strategically. Every additional technology we use for development costs us alot in terms of resources. Randomly adoption new technologies will keep our team from developing expertise required to deliver reliable, maintainable systems. Not having expertise means development process will be very slow.

Human Resources #

1. Importance of retaning skilled resource
2. Replacement should be equally skilled and experianced person
3. When a skilled person leaves, department losses
   1. Skill
   2. Experience of tech
   3. Experience of applying those Skills and Tech in KFUPM context it takes time even for skilled and exp person to know this.
4. Performance based incentives
5. We work more than other departments, but get less privileges