Rails Maturity Models

Most Endorsed Practices for this firm

• Onsite Customer

  We did this with one major customer and it worked really well. Rather than having the customer work on-site with us, we took over their board room for the duration of the project. We created our own informative workspace in there, had the customer available whenever we needed him and it saved us a fortune in that we didn't rent an office for 16 months!

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    We've had clients pop in regularly for days at a time, some just for meetings. Whatever the client prefers.

    Mark Connell at Rubaidh

  • Also endorsed by

    • Graeme Mathieson at Rubaidh
  2

• Distributed Version Control

  We've been using Git for version control since January 2007 on our own private git server, but switched to GitHub in the summer because of the awesome collaboration features available.

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    Git

    Mark Connell at Rubaidh

  • Also endorsed by

    • Graeme Mathieson at Rubaidh
  2

• Sponsored Open Source Contributions

  Over the years, Rubaidh has made a number of open source contributions, both in releasing its own gems/plugins, and in contributing back to other open source projects. If there's an extraction we can make from one project that holds no specific business value (generally, unique IP) to the client, then we'll make that extraction when we next need it and release the resulting plugin as open source.

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    Numerous plugins with more to come!

    Mark Connell at Rubaidh

  • Also endorsed by

    • Graeme Mathieson at Rubaidh
  2

• Celebrate Success

  We have one-week iterations that finish on a Friday. We go to the pub after work on a Friday whenever we can. 'nuff said. :-)

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    Pub every Friday, regardless of success!

    Mark Connell at Rubaidh

  • Also endorsed by

    • Graeme Mathieson at Rubaidh
  2

• Everyone Together

  This one's pretty easy for Rubaidh since we currently only have two full time developers. However, even when we bring in contractors for particular roles, it's to work on-site. The bandwidth is so much higher in the office than over any remote communications mechanism we've discovered so far.

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    Lovely office in Musselburgh beside the river.

    Mark Connell at Rubaidh

  • Also endorsed by

    • Graeme Mathieson at Rubaidh
  2

• Scripted Deployments

  We script the build and deployment of every project we do in Iteration 1. In almost every case, it's with Capistrano, but we have been known to inherit the odd Java project and we've hacked in an ant task to deploy the build. We always have both staging and production environments for client projects, and both are scripted in the same way, so it's just a case of typing "cap staging deploy" or "cap production deploy" to deploy to the appropriate cluster.

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    Capistrano for app deployments. We are also looking at using Chef internally for structured server deployment

    Mark Connell at Rubaidh

  • Also endorsed by

    • Graeme Mathieson at Rubaidh
  2

• Continuous Integration

  We've toyed with a number of CI tools over the years to give us visibility of the state of our code bases. However, no matter which tool we use to give us that visibility, we are continually integrating code. Independent lines of development tend not to stray from the master branch for more than a day. Our current CI monitoring tool of choice is Atlassian's Bamboo. It's pretty awesome with Ruby (sometimes on Rails) projects.

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    It always looks shiny and green :)

    Mark Connell at Rubaidh

  • Also endorsed by

    • Graeme Mathieson at Rubaidh
  2

• Github

  For a while, we'd been running our own, private, Git repository and just using GitHub for public ones, but frankly it wasn't worth the hassle and GitHub offers a wealth of additional features that make it worthwhile.

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    Everyday, lurvly stuff.

    Mark Connell at Rubaidh

  • Also endorsed by

    • Graeme Mathieson at Rubaidh
  2

• Shared Work Environment (No Cubicles)

  Everybody is in a single, open-plan office. Everybody can see everybody else (and the fish tank). If folks need privacy, we have a conference room too but, for the most part, we tend to take private conversations to the on-site coffee shop.

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    Just a divider between us and the outside world (but there is a door, not to worry!)

    Mark Connell at Rubaidh

  • Also endorsed by

    • Graeme Mathieson at Rubaidh
  2

• Internal Instant Communication

  We use Campfire as a "log" of everything that's happening around the company. Most of our tools have the ability to post a message to Campfire when some event happens. Since we have "Everyone Together", there's rarely much conversation in there, but it's a great place to see what activity there has been if you've been away from the office for a while.

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    Campfire

    Mark Connell at Rubaidh

  • Also endorsed by

    • Graeme Mathieson at Rubaidh
  2

• Pets Allowed Policy

  We go one better than allowing pets: we have our own fish tank in the office. It's currently home to 6 Cherry Shrimps, but we'll soon be introducing a small shoal of small Tetras (probably Fire Tetras) and, the piece de resistance, a Siamese Fighting Fish (Betta).

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    Fish tank in the office

    Mark Connell at Rubaidh

  • Also endorsed by

    • Graeme Mathieson at Rubaidh
  2

• Frequent Releases

  Having had a long background in open source software, "release early, release often" is a motto that's hard to shake off!

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  • Endorsed by

    • Graeme Mathieson at Rubaidh
  1

• Cucumber

  Frankly, we don't do Cucumber because of any grand ambitions to improve our customer's ROI or because it improves the quality of our code, or even because it reduces the YAGNI-effect (though it's great at all those things!). We use Cucumber because we really enjoy working with it.

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    Started looking at it a few months ago and it's here to stay I think. Really nice for expressing business value and makes life a bit easier.

    Mark Connell at Rubaidh

  • Also endorsed by

    • Graeme Mathieson at Rubaidh
  2

• Test-Driven Development

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  • Endorsed by

    • Graeme Mathieson at Rubaidh
  1

• Story Carding

  We currently use Pivotal Tracker to track our stories, iterations and releases. I have a sneaking suspicion we might revert back to index cards at some point, though, at least for projects where we can have an on-site customer.

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  • Endorsed by

    • Graeme Mathieson at Rubaidh
  1

• Product Development

  The culture of our company was always about product development, from day one. We've been using consulting to perform market research and to produce enough capital reserves to fund our own product development. We've got a few great ideas in the pipeline just now, so expect to see some exciting business-focused products appearing in 2009! (That's not to say that we intend to abandon any of our consulting clients -- we're in this business for the long term.)

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  • Endorsed by

    • Graeme Mathieson at Rubaidh
  1

• Informative Workspace

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  • Endorsed by

    • Graeme Mathieson at Rubaidh
  1