Week 7 – On-Boarding New Developers

How long does it take to On-Board New Developers in your team?
This week, we added 2 new developers to our team. This was a good opportunity to understand if our processes, documentation and videos are enough to have, what I call “Self-Boarding’, I want to have a step-by-step process for anyone to follow fully train themselves with our processes/tools/software/code/computer configuration and application to become contributing team member very soon.
I don’t mean to have a 100page document, I believe videos are essential. In fact, we record all of our training, sprint review and demo sessions. Sometimes I even record training video for a specific task.
So far, I’ve seen very positive results from the videos, which minimizes questions and allows the team to focus their efforts on the essentials.
It’s too early to tell, but on-boarding our new developers will show us if we have enough material for a smooth SelfBoarding
In many places, OnBoarding new Developers is a large effort, takes a lot of time from everyone in the team. And If you’re a junior developer, all I can say is good luck.
It’s worse in enterprise, where simply getting your machine configured might take weeks.
What’s your On-Boarding process like?