Daily Team Log

In development teams, it is common practice to hold “stand-up” meetings each morning. This gives everyone a chance to briefly tell their team what they did the day before, what they plan to work on that day, and what issues they may be facing (so others can help).

We expect every team to keep a log of short, daily status updates. Now is a great time to get into the habit.

What goes into a team log?

The Daily Log is a short list of things you do each day, whether a written account or a summary in the form of bullet points.

This should be a list of short, pragmatic daily updates and, at the very least, answer the question “What have I done?”

That could just be bullet points like “Set up Homebrew on our computers so we could install Postgres”, or “Discussed the command line switch X with our mentor and agreed on a test case”.

Feel free to go into more detail. Other questions to consider may be: What are we going to do tomorrow? What issues do we need help with?

Writing your Daily Log

To enter these: * login into the Teams App * go to Status Updates (top of the page)

Tips

We recommend that you write log entries at the end of your workday. It will be fresh in your mind and a great way to reflect on everything you’ve achieved.

Keep a list of keywords about your work throughout the day. This will help you quickly remember important points when you do your write-up.

Don’t spend too much time on making things pretty. This doesn’t need to be laborious or take too much time (5-10 minutes max!). You should keep the log as a team, so share the work between you.

Why keep a team log?

This will help you: get familiar with good team practice and the high level of transparency typical for Open Source development with self-reflection give us and other teams a good overview of what your RGSoC team is doing remember what you’ve done and learnt when you apply for jobs become comfortable with the practice of sharing your work publicly

It might feel scary to share at first, especially if you’re starting out or feel inexperienced, but you needn’t worry. Open Source culture is a lot about public collaboration toward a collective goal. Sharing, asking for help, and helping others is part-and-parcel of OSS development.

Every user’s activity is visible in Git commit logs on GitHub. Everyone considers this a good thing because it boosts all the fantastic possibilities of collaboration that are typical to Open Source development culture. That’s why we think it’s essential to your experience of being part of a public coding community.

This resource will also help us conduct basic supervision and catch situations where teams are encountering issues. We may be able to help. Obviously, this won’t usually be required because each team will already have a fantastic local support network in place, but it boosts the program’s quality management, which many sponsors look for in a well-organized project.

What now?

If something isn’t quite clear, you have any questions, or you have a very strong reason for why you cannot keep the log, please let us know by emailing contact@rgsoc.org