在Moonpig作为高性能工程团队远程工作

In this article I will talk about how a high-performance engineering team at Moonpig adapted to a remote working environment, whilst they improved their ways of working, and continued to deliver on improving the experience we provide to our customers.

在本文中，我将讨论Moonpig的高性能工程团队如何适应远程工作环境，同时他们改进了工作方式，并继续致力于改善我们为客户提供的体验。

Moonpig Engineering consists of teams of people with complementary skill sets that enable features to be developed and tested in short spaces of time, whilst maintaining good engineering practices and user experience. This is achieved through collaboration within and across teams, and dedication to making a better product for our customers.

Moonpig Engineering由具有互补技能的人员团队组成，这些人员可以在短时间内开发和测试功能，同时保持良好的工程实践和用户体验。 这是通过团队内部和团队之间的协作以及致力于为我们的客户提供更好的产品来实现的。

Each team has slightly different ways of working and they can adapt their processes to best suit them. The team that I work with use many extreme programming practices within our day-to-day engineering efforts. We are a team of eight people with diverse skill sets. We hold multiple agile ceremonies and meetings throughout the week and we pair or mob on each task and aim to maintain focus on a single piece of work at any given time.

每个团队的工作方式略有不同，他们可以调整流程以使其最适合他们。 我与之合作的团队在日常工程工作中使用了许多极端的编程实践。 我们是一个由八个人组成的团队，具有不同的技能。 我们在整个星期内都会举行多次敏捷仪式和会议，我们对每个任务进行配对或搜集，目的是在任何给定时间专注于一项工作。

In an office environment these processes are simple to implement. However, when the COVID-19 global pandemic broke out, forcing a lockdown in the UK during March 2020, Moonpig moved out of our office and into our homes. In a remote working environment, teams are physically separated, and their only channels of communication are through their computers, making collaboration more difficult. So how did Moonpig maintain these critical ways of working when our engineering team started working from home?

在办公环境中，这些过程很容易实现。 但是，当COVID-19全球大流行爆发后，迫使英国在2020年3月锁定该基地时，Moonpig搬出了我们的办公室，回到了家中。 在远程工作环境中，团队在物理上是分开的，他们唯一的沟通渠道是通过计算机，这使得协作更加困难。 那么，当我们的工程团队从家里开始工作时，Moonpig如何保持这些关键的工作方式？

＃1 Google Meet“ Town Square” (#1 The Google Meet “Town Square”)

The first hurdle to overcome as a team was ensuring that we could still communicate easily and maintain the energy that we had in the office. We use an instant messaging system, Slack, to send messages to one another. We also use Google Meet for video conferencing in meetings. But how could we easily communicate outside of meetings and on a more casual level?

作为团队要克服的第一个障碍是确保我们仍然可以轻松地进行沟通，并保持我们在办公室中拥有的精力。 我们使用即时消息传递系统Slack来彼此发送消息。 我们还使用Google Meet在会议中进行视频会议。 但是，我们如何能够轻松地在会议之外和更随意的水平上进行交流？

Our solution was the creation of our team’s “Town Square”, a single Google Meet room that any member of our team, or any other team, could join at any time. This very quickly became the equivalent of our desks. We would join the room in the morning, have our morning stand-up, host our mobbing sessions and have our team’s meetings within this room. We could also have more casual conversations here to help boost the team’s morale. It became our most important medium of communication as a team.

我们的解决方案是创建团队的“城镇广场”，即一个Google Meet会议室，我们团队的任何成员或任何其他团队均可随时加入。 这很快就变成了我们的办公桌。 我们将在早上加入会议室，进行早晨站立，主持围攻会议，并在此会议室举行团队会议。 我们也可以在这里进行更多随意的交谈，以提高团队士气。 它成为我们团队中最重要的沟通媒介。

However, when we wanted to break into pairs or have multiple conversations we found this difficult in the one Google Meet. So we created a second Google Meet that we could use for Zoom-style “breakout” sessions. This became known as our “secondary control room”.

但是，当我们想成对或进行多个对话时，发现在一次Google Meet中很难做到这一点。 因此，我们创建了第二个Google Meet，可用于缩放样式的“分组讨论”会话。 这就是我们的“辅助控制室”。

＃2 Visual Studio Code实时共享 (#2 Visual Studio Code Live Share)

The second problem we encountered was “How do we mob remotely?” The solution to this was the Live Share extension for Visual Studio Code. We had already been using Visual Studio Code in the office so moving to remote mobbing was pretty simple. We all installed the extension and were quickly able to join each other’s coding sessions and work together on solutions whilst discussing them in our “Town Square”. Everyone in the session could see the code, access the host’s shared console and access any local servers being run by the host.

我们遇到的第二个问题是“我们如何远程移动？” 解决方案是使用Visual Studio Code的Live Share扩展 。 我们已经在办公室中使用了Visual Studio Code，因此迁移到远程聚集非常简单。 我们都安装了扩展程序，并能够快速加入彼此的编码会议，并在我们在“城市广场”中讨论解决方案的同时共同努力。 会话中的每个人都可以看到代码，访问主机的共享控制台以及访问主机正在运行的任何本地服务器。

＃3壁画的交互式白板 (#3 Mural’s Interactive Whiteboards)

A Mural template for a remote team retrospective

远程团队回顾的壁画模板

In the office we would often create diagrams on the whiteboard before starting development. But when working from home, none of us have access to a whiteboard — and even if we did, how would we share it with one another? After a little research we discovered Mural, an interactive whiteboard tool that allows multiple collaborators to work together in the same space. This enabled us to doodle to our hearts’ content and assisted us in visualising pieces of work before we started developing them. We even found an integration that enabled us to directly create tickets in our project tracking system, JIRA, from our Mural sticky notes. We also started hosting our retrospectives and refinement meetings in Mural.

在办公室里，我们通常会在开始开发之前在白板上创建图表。 但是在家里工作时，我们谁也无法访问白板-即使我们这样做，我们又如何彼此共享白板？ 经过一些研究，我们发现了Mural ，这是一个交互式白板工具，它允许多个协作者在同一空间中一起工作。 这使我们能够涂鸦自己内心的内容，并在开始开发作品之前帮助我们可视化作品。 我们甚至发现了一个集成 ，使我们能够从壁画便笺中直接在项目跟踪系统JIRA中创建票证。 我们还开始在壁画中主持回顾和完善会议。

＃4但是休息一下呢？ (#4 But what about breaks?)

Taking regular breaks is just as important as doing the work. In the office we would often stop what we were doing to go to the kitchen and make a hot beverage. In that time we could refresh our brains ready for the challenges that would lie ahead. In a remote world, without taking breaks we became tired and therefore less productive. We found that it becomes harder to keep track of time and ensure that everyone in the team takes regular breaks. Therefore, to get us into the habit of taking breaks, we introduced a Pomodoro timer to our mobbing sessions. There’s even a Pomodoro plugin for VS Code Live Share. This helped us get back into the routine of taking regular breaks and ensuring we were able to continue being productive as a team.

定期休息与工作一样重要。 在办公室里，我们经常会停下来去厨房做些热饮料。 在那段时间里，我们可以振作精神，为即将到来的挑战做好准备。 在偏僻的世界中，我们不休息就累了，因此生产力下降。 我们发现，跟踪时间并确保团队中的每个人都定期休息变得越来越困难。 因此，为了使我们养成休息的习惯，我们在围攻活动中引入了Pomodoro计时器。 甚至还有一个VS Code Live Share的Pomodoro插件 。 这帮助我们重返了定期休息的例行工作，并确保我们能够继续保持团队协作的生产力。

＃5信任您的团队 (#5 Trust your team)

As we continue to try new tools and processes we will continue to find new challenges. And as a team it is important that we are able to respond to these when they arise, and that we can find ways to adapt and improve our processes. No team is perfect and there are always things that can be improved. To help us improve, we have adopted a very important behaviour: trust. By trusting one another and being able to openly discuss opinions and provide constructive feedback we are able to regularly reflect on our ways of working. We have conversations that become “mini-retrospectives” which can lead to us experimenting with new ways of working, helping to make us a happier and better performing team.

随着我们继续尝试新的工具和流程，我们将继续发现新的挑战。 作为一个团队，重要的是我们能够在这些问题出现时做出回应，并找到适应和改进流程的方法。 没有团队是完美的，总有事情可以改进。 为了帮助我们改进，我们采取了一项非常重要的行为：信任。 通过彼此信任并能够公开讨论意见并提供建设性反馈，我们能够定期反思我们的工作方式。 我们之间的对话变成了“迷你回顾”，可以使我们尝试新的工作方式，从而使我们更快乐，表现更好。

摘要 (Summary)

We have found that by adopting new tools and processes to replace those we had in the office and by continuing to improve our ways of working, we are able to work just as efficiently remotely as when we were in the office and without compromising on the quality of the code or the morale of the team. In doing so the team’s productivity is sustainable and we can continue to create a better experience for our customers.

我们发现，通过采用新的工具和流程来代替我们在办公室中使用的工具和流程，并通过不断改进工作方式，我们能够像在办公室时一样高效地进行远程工作，而不会影响质量代码或团队的士气。 通过这样做，团队的生产力是可持续的，我们可以继续为客户创造更好的体验。

However, we haven’t solved all of our problems. For example, in the office we would often have “water cooler” conversations: the casual conversations that would happen between members of different teams whilst making a coffee. This becomes very difficult at home as there is no company-wide space for people to gather and talk. This is a problem we are still thinking about and we are trialling new ideas all of the time.

但是，我们还没有解决所有问题。 例如，在办公室里，我们经常会进行“饮水机”对话：在喝咖啡的同时，不同团队的成员之间会发生随意的对话。 在家里，这变得非常困难，因为公司范围内没有可供人们聚会和交谈的空间。 这是我们仍在思考的问题，我们一直在尝试新的想法。

If you have any ideas or opinions, please let us know in the comments. It would be great to hear what you think!

如果您有任何想法或意见，请在评论中告知我们。 很高兴听到您的想法！

关于我 (About me)

I am a software engineer at Moonpig Engineering who is passionate about writing clean, well-factored code, using XP practices to solve problems and creating great experiences for our customers.

我是Moonpig Engineering的一名软件工程师，他热衷于编写干净，结构合理的代码，使用XP的实践来解决问题并为客户创造良好的体验。

翻译自: https://medium.com/moonpigtech/working-remotely-as-a-high-performance-engineering-team-at-moonpig-957b267de1d4