Effective Use Of Templates

Objectives

Purpose of using templates
Inspect your work
Automatize

Agenda

What is template?
Template as a shortcut
Constructing a template
Template pitfall #1
Template pitfall #2
Template pitfall #3

What is template?

What do we use them for? Real life examples? What is common goal of making a template? Does templates hold creativity off?

Objective:

Templates aren’t evil
Optimize most boring stuff
Don’t misuse Agenda:
Inspect and then record your most common cases
Adapt tools at your disposal to the situation
Establish a template on how to make productive template

Template as a shortcut

Common practices

Work standards

We already use templates all the time Identifing activities -> checklist Could be standarized? Can be automated? Can be incorporated into culture of organization?

Examples:

All methodology frameworks
Developers Repository
Meeting scenarios
Coding Guidelines
Annual Employee Evaluation
CI system
EULA

Templates expand creativity

Focus on essence first while having prepared enviroment ready to go. Common ground to create high standard. Time saver.

Templates

Shortcut in common tasts
Inspect & Adapt method
Knowlwdge sharing

Constructing a template

Gather data
Generalize
Be specific
Let it live

Gathering data as a part of empirical process is a must to be able to reason about the process.
Observations should be analized to find common themes from gathered data. Choose those which would benefit the most from having more standarized process.
Be specific about the purpose and goals of the template.
- Who will benefit from using it?
- What changes would need to happen for it to succede?
Share template, ask for feedback, change it.
- Encourage people to use it.
- When to enforce template on people?
- Observe changes made
- Adapt in new version in new iteration
- Record and share template and observations

Template pitfall #1

Set in stone

Templating is a process not an one-time thing Establish feedback loop and decide on evaluation period Always remember what you measure and for what ends Don’t be scared to experiment

Template pitfall #2

“Nah, I don’t use it”

Encouragement to keep up discipline in applying developed template should come from following sources:

agreeing with identified goal (shared goal)
understanding the need of template in given field (shared idea)
was part of working group that created it (shared work, relevancy)

Enforcement means external pressure, while encouragement is more like enabling inner motivation to action.

What problems do we encunter?

Template pitfall #3

It’s a bother and not an aid

Is it relevant in our current workflow? Do all groups of interest agree that template is useful? What is valuable, what was the goal of it? What are main bothers? How can we keep valuable ideas while optmizing the template?

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Effective Use Of Templates