Last Updated: November 6th, 2019
This post is a collection of current best practices for grantees, people and projects in the aeternity research and development ecosystem. The topic will be updated whenever new information is available. For now, I want to get started with a general overview of ABCP’s.
Over the past year following things have established themselves.
Stand-ups and Devchat
As usually done in agile software development, many teams perform daily stand-ups. Stand-ups are usually 15-30min long and happen every day to coordinate work within the team. When needed, teams which are dependend from each other have a joint standup (SDK and protocol for example). Updates are given from the team, guests are usually spectating without giving an update themselves (or only if there is an issue to report). During the day, ongoing discussions happen in devchat.aeternity.com
Weekly public research and development call
The weekly call was established due to a lack of communication across all teams and to update the broader aeternity community about what is happening on tech. The calls are moderated and held like cross-ecosystem vertical updates. Questions can be asked but usually it is focused on a short and dense weekly work report. Breaking changes and updates are usually announced in those calls too. One person from each team is invited to participate.
Intermediary Reports
In order to keep track of the research and development progress, several teams started to publish updates every 14 days in the aeternity forum. This has been adopted by several startups and core protocol components. An example of such an intermediary report can be found here:
Final research reports
Next to the publishing of all code as open-source in the dedicated GitHub repository, all teams are urged to write documentation and specification of their work. Whenever a feature or major milestone is finished, it is common practice to publish a detailed research report in the forum. The report can be a scientific paper like this one
or a proper blog article like this one
It is mandatory for all grantees to submit those research reports next to the product that has been developed or improved.
Unified product management
Not yet established but in continues improvement is the unified way of managing the research and development on GitHub. The idea is to make it easy to onboard to ongoing projects by having a standard across teams on how to report and track issues. A first draft can be found here:
This is just the beginning. More AFBP’s will follow soon. Feedback welcome!