Define a two-person team for working on development and operations issues

[choldgraf]

Context

We currently have team members take on development and operational issues as individuals. This helps us spread the load across many team members. However, it comes with a few challenges:

• It can be difficult to get quick feedback and attention between team members because we all have our own workstreams to focus on
• It can be frustrating to hit blockers or confusion points, and not have a person readily-available to help discuss and guide
• It is harder to keep track of project checkpoints / progress if we are working in silos
• It is harder for us to share information / experience across our team without explicit structures for doing so

Proposal

We define a process for working on issues in pairs. This would roughly follow a structure like:

• Issue Lead: They are responsible for getting the work done, for maintaining a backlog associated with the work as it evolves (e.g., as a GitHub Projects board), and for updating team members with progress.
• Issue Support: They are a point-of-contact for the issue lead. This means giving the project lead extra attention in conversations and brainstorming, as well as in reviews. They don’t have to do all of the reviewing, but should be extra attentive to help the Issue Lead make progress.

Updates and actions

No response

[sgibson91]

I am very +1 on this idea - it worked great between Erik and myself during the CI/CD project.

I do want to mention that we should take timezones into account as well when making these pairings. E.g., we're asking the Issue Support person to be "extra attentive", but that's only useful if their working hours overlap with the Issue Lead. Otherwise the Issue Lead could still be waiting overnight to get PR feedback/approval.