Struggling with team engagement and knowledge sharing? Our rotating roles system ensures that everyone on the team gets a chance to shine and learn something new while taking care of daily tasks. These can be:
- handling releases or deployments
- running meetings
- grooming backlog
- keeping production service alive
- interacting with other teams, users and community
These should be a responsibility of the whole team, not just a single person. With rotating roles, you can have an engaged team that takes turns in the daily operations and is not disrupted when a key member leaves for a vacation.
This repository is an evolution of the rotating roles that we started in the Packit team. You can see it in action here and check role assignments in the repository's issues.
After the technique proved successful, we followed with a series of blog posts:
- 📄 How to run an open-source service?
- 📄 Inception of rotating roles
- 📄 Share team responsibilities efficiently
- 📄 Role rotation tutorial
And we also did a presentation:
We have interviewed several colleagues of ours from Red Hat. The conclusion we reached was there are multiple common roles that apply in many teams. We will define them here so you can easily reuse the roles in your team. They don’t apply everywhere and to everyone — you are welcome to be inspired and create a role that will fit your team.
Having a productive meeting that sticks to agenda, has notes, and a clear outcome, has a tremendeous impact on everyone. With one responsible meeting lead, you can have consistently an effective and productive conversation.
More about this role
- Moderate agreed-upon team meetings
- Make sure people stay on topic
- Follow meeting agenda - address all points
- Write down action items and make sure the they are assigned
- Make meeting notes or assign someone on the call to write them down
- Meetings need moderators, otherwise they succumb to chaos
- Well run meeting is the difference between a complete waste of time and effectively coordinating in a group of people
- Not everyone likes the attention, so this can be a big step outside of comfort zone for many.
- It can be tiring to be in charge of everything all the time. Managers and leads can relate. Team members may suddenly feel more empathy and compassion once they realize that leading a meeting requires significant effort.
As we participate in our agile methodology technique, be it scrum, kanban, or anything else, we should have someone to be in charge. This role can be very similar to the Meeting lead. We are keeping it separate here so we can clearly distinguish between agile development methodology and just running meetings.
More about this role
- The team sticks to all the agile ceremonies as they are defined.
- Coordinate with the meeting lead or be one.
- Make sure everyone has the capacity to work on their tasks.
- Assist people who are struggling in their assignments.
- Volunteer if possible for i.e. research, testing, or reaching out to different teams if needed.
- Celebrate success with the team.
- It could become chaotic without an agile lead.
- Every team is different and some can benefit a lot from getting the guidance.
- The responsibility to be in charge of the team's current agile iteration (such as scrum sprint, or a kanban cycle).
- It is an important experience for junior members of the team to be the lead.
Building community can take a lot of time and energy. It's something we are often not taught at a school. When users can directly interact with project's developers, it allows them to quickly address issues and start a lasting professional relationship.
This role can be paired with the watcher of alerts and monitoring.
More about this role
- Pay attention to questions and comments from your community in your chat rooms, issue trackers, mailing lists, social media.
- Bring user's pain points back to the team and make sure they are triaged and prioritized.
- Suggest improvements based on the feedback.
- Lead community meetings.
- Your users will stay, when you listen to them.
- Close relationship between project members and users or customers can be a key to success.
- See how people use your team's solutions.
- Improve social skills and step out of the comfort zone.
- Expand your professional network and become more visible.
Reviews are a pillar of a successful project. They make sure we are not making obvious mistakes and can be an effective learning tool for all parties. Make sure that your team is clear who is responsible for driving a proposal towards the end (i.e. merging a pull request): if it's the author, maintainer, manager, or reviewer. If you are struggling with reviews, or even the design process, your team may benefit from Woody Zuill's Mob Programming.
More about this role
- Provide reviews in project’s git repositories, design documents, email drafts or external communication before it’s sent out.
- If a proposal is unclear, don’t be afraid to set up a 1:1 time with the author of the pull request or a document to be on the same page.
- Try the proposed solution in practice so you can provide hands-on feedback before it's released.
- Reviews can be an unpopular activity. Good review is really hard, takes a lot of time and requires empathy so that none of the sides get offended. It's an important skill we all should train.
- Good review culture in a project helps you build amazing solutions.
- Collaboration in teams without reviews leads to silos - knowledge and expertise will be accumulated in people who make solutions.
- Be amazing reviewers. This is immensely important to junior team members.
- Become better coders, analysts, researchers.
- Better knowledge about the code base to be able to review the changes.
Keeping an eye on alerts, metrics, and CI test runs is crucial for maintaining system stability and catching issues early. This role ensures the health of services, preventing small problems from escalating into major incidents.
More about this role
- Monitor system alerts and respond to any critical issues that arise.
- Keep track of key metrics (e.g. load, response times) to ensure systems are functioning within acceptable limits.
- Regularly check the results of CI test runs to catch external outages.
- Investigate and communicate the cause of any alerts or failing CI to the team.
- Document recurring issues and propose improvements to prevent future problems.
- Ensure that any necessary escalations are communicated to the users (e.g. via status page).
- Without active monitoring, issues can go unnoticed until they become critical, impacting service uptime and user experience.
- Proactive monitoring and addressing issues early helps service health and prevents disruptions.
- Gain experience with monitoring tools and CI.
- Learn how to troubleshoot alerts and CI failures.
- Build problem-solving and critical-thinking skills.
Managing smooth deployments and releases is critical for the success of any service. By ensuring the process is coordinated and thoroughly checked, you prevent issues in production and maintain service reliability.
More about this role
- Coordinate with the team to confirm whether deploying new changes is safe.
- Follow established instructions to carry out the new deployment.
- Capture shortcomings in any of the steps.
- Monitoring the outcome for any new issues.
- If your product ships as packages, manage the release process.
- Communicate release notes and any deployment impacts to users.
- Propose improvements to the release and deployment process.
- Deployments and releases can introduce risks. Without a structured approach, issues may slip into production.
- Having one person responsible ensures clear accountability and coordination.
- This role prevents disruption by ensuring deployments are carefully planned and executed.
- Gain a deeper understanding of the deployment process.
- Experience the challenge of handling releases under pressure, building problem-solving and decision-making skills.
We couldn't compile this database of roles without the interviews. Thank you to: Michal Srb (@msrb), Neil Smith, Martin Pitt (@martinpitt), Petr Splichal (@psss), Miro Vadkerti (@thrix), Martin Krizek (@mkrizek).
