Verbal discussions are great to get a lot of things done, but often people remeber the results differtently. To prevent possible hicups in the communication important discussions which are used as base for the further development and specific coding of V-HAB should be documented. The steps below provide a guideline for how this documentation should be handled to ensure that all participants understood the discussion the same way and the things that are created based on the discussion are acceptable for all developers. An additional advantage of this is the documentation that is automatically created by this approach which can help if a few years from now someone is wondering why something was done in a specific way and if there were reasons why it was not done differently.
- One person participating in the discussion summarizes it either in a comment to an existing issue or a new issue on gitlab
- If specific action items are decided upon they are implemented as tasks in the issue with a specific responsible person
- After the discussion the other participants are asked if they accept and understand this summary (directly after the discussion not online) to remove most issue from the text early on
- All other participants are tagged in the issue and asked to provide a short comment within the next week that the text and the action items are accepted. This serves to document the approval of the other parties and should invite everyone who did not write the text to check if the meaning is still clear a few days after the discussion.
- After this, non-participating persons (people who were not present for the verbal discussion) will be tagged in the comments and asked if they have any further comments/problems with the discussion. Again, within one week everyone should provide a comment to agree or disagree
- If a person does not provide a comment within one week (on either deadline) the acceptance of the text and the action items is implied and the process will consider it like having written “everything is fine and understood”. In case of vacation/extenuating circumstances this timeframe can be increased. Vacation has to be visible in outlook calender to count. Extenuating circumstances have to be communicated by providing a short comment that you currently do not have the time to read it and at what time you will be able to do so.
- With this process after (hopefully) 2 weeks we will have documented decisions and the acceptance of these decisions, which will hopefully prevent future communication mismatches.
- Discussion that are not documented like this are not valid ground for any arguments in the future! If arguments pop up about undocumented verbal discussions, you should simply repeat the discussion and then document it using this approach