Fundraising/Team processes/DRI

Designated Response Individual(s) (aka The Chaos Crew)

In August of 2022, the Fundraising Tech (FR-Tech) team began incorporating a Designated Response Individual (DRI) model to the team's workflow.

The folks currently tasked with being the DRIs are affectionately known as the Chaos Crew.

What is DRI?

For each sprint, there are 2 individuals designated as the DRIs; a primary and secondary.

These two individuals are responsible for fielding FR-Tech's interrupt and reactive work.

The goal is to reduce the interruption on the engineers doing the feature-driven sprint work.

General Responsibilities

In scope activities

• Incident response, management, and retrospectives
• Failmail/Fraudmail
• Chores list - task T258527
• When time available:
  • Proactive investigations into sustainability work, eg: performance, testing, technical debt.

Out of scope activities

• Major refactors the should be scoped, planned, and reviewed.

Processes

• Task tracking is done via "Fundraising Tech - Chaos Crew" workboard board.
• The workboard is a long-running Kanban board (not a sprint board).
• Tasks are triaged (prioritized) as they come in. If not, they are triaged on a weekly basis following the regular Monday backlog meeting.
• During the Sprint/Chaos Crew change-over meeting, the Chaos Crew does a Chaos crew handover.

Rotation

Everyone rotates every 2-week sprint:

• Engineer n -> Engineer n+1 (no effective role change)
• Engineer 4 -> Secondary DRI
• Secondary DRI -> Primary DRI
• Primary DRI -> Engineer 1

A full rotation occurs every 6 sprints, which is about every 3 months, so about every quarter.

See: Current rotation assignments.

DRI Roles

There are two DRI individuals: a primary and a secondary.

Secondary -> Primary roll-in

When someone transitions from feature work to DRI work they start as the secondary. This is to allow any incidents that began during the previous sprint to have continuity by the now-primary DRI. The secondary can then get up to speed from the primary.

Primary DRI responsibilities

• Primary incident response.
• Shares relevant updates with Secondary DRI.
• Proactive investigations

Secondary DRI responsibilities

• Transitioning from feature work duties to DRI duties,
  • eg: final code-reviews, hand-offs, or similar.
• Reviewing the activities of the DRI Team’s previous sprint including any active or on-going issues.
• Chores list.

Primary & Secondary DRI responsibilities

• Automation!
  • Especially the chore work.
• Documentation!
  • If you answer a question/resolved an issue that wasn’t already documented, document it!
  • “Wiki gnome / wiki gardening” activities appreciated.
• Log DRI Team activities on the tracking task.

References

• Microspeak: DRI, the designated response individual