High quality, consistent development practices are the key to the creation of a robust digital product. The value we place on this has always been significant, stretching back across our 15 year history to today. In order to maintain this high standard, we’ve worked hard to review internal processes, learn from and build on our experience, and implement a series of effective solutions to ensuring the code we ship is always tip-top.
The tools we bring online in order to achieve this range from code based interventions, to standardised ways of producing documentation that ensures they’re accessible for our partners and team members supporting departments. Alongside these, one of the tools used by the development team is our internal Wiki.
What is our internal Wiki?
Our internal Wiki incorporates our coding standards with tid-bits, tricks and hints curated by the team in order to expedite the development process. If there’s something a member of our development team has learned as part of their work on a project, it can be logged in a central repository for recall at a later date. Likewise the information stored within it acts as bible for common lookups by the team, including file structure, naming conventions, core plugins and in house packages.
Why do we have an internal Wiki?
There are a few reasons why our wiki is so important, let’s take a look at a few of the most important:
It helps ensure consistency
Our developers will work across multiple projects within a given year, while they’ll always be part of a core team on one project, each of them have specialist skills they can contribute to the range of products that we work on. Having a Wiki ensures their knowledge is as transferable as it can be, those hints and tips they’ve picked up from years of experience in different industries are translated into best practices within the wiki. In sharing their experience with the team we’re reducing the time it takes to transfer those skills into the wider team.
This transfer of knowledge helps create consistency across the products we develop, and the industries and use cases we develop them for.
We can bring new team members up to speed faster.
New team members on the Arch team bring an abundance of new knowledge and learnings. As part of the experience of working within a development team, we can ensure the knowledge of their new Arch team members is transferred to them as quickly as possible, allowing them to jump into their projects with gusto.
It improves transparency
Having a centralised repository of coding practice and hints creates a strong foundation for two of our core values, transparency and equality. In sharing knowledge in this open source way, we’re actively participating in the upkeep of these values. Additionally, it places every one of our team members on an even footing, everyone in our development teams actively participates in skillsharing by way of our storing information in the internal Wiki.
In summary
The internal Wiki helps us maintain high standards of code, by ensuring information is transparent, shareable and easily referenceable. Allowing all our development team members to be ultra-effective in their work, and progress through projects in an efficient and effective manner.