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What to expect in your first month

Like any new developers learning your codebase and preferences, it takes time for GitStart to get up to speed. We’ve found that the first month is the most challenging, but it gets easier after that.

We can start from day one

From the moment you’re onboarded, we have developers ready to start working on your tickets. We ask that you have your backlog in tip-top shape before you start, so we can be productive from day one.

Oversharing is caring

It will be useful to scope tickets and provide enough context, similar to how you will scope it for any newly-onboarded engineers. However, after the first few batches of pull requests successfully shipped, you can reduce the amount of context embedded in the tickets.

Examples of good first issues

What’s a good place to start? Glad you asked. In short:

  • any ticket that doesn’t require much business context knowledge is good for the first weeks
  • bug fixes that are well-scoped and have clear acceptance criteria
  • smaller tickets that can be completed without major hiccups or dependencies

As product knowledge increases, you can increase the complexity of tickets.

What’s not ideal during the first month

Try to avoid tickets that require GitStart to make product and technical assumptions or contain many moving parts and dependencies. Examples include:

  • Dependency upgrades, such as upgrading from one version of React to another. There is a very high bandwidth of potential side effects that could occur from this type of work.
  • Critical bug fixes or time-sensitive work. We need to be able to take our time, and we don’t want to frustrate you.

Our estimates are not perfect

We try to be as accurate as possible with our estimates, but we’re not perfect. Our pricing model is getting better, but in the first month, our credit estimates may be off by a bit. We will try to be as transparent as possible about this.

  • Can I assign epics to GitStart for larger tickets? Yes, you can have one large ticket with many well-defined sub-tasks for us to execute while having a broader context.