Here’s something to think about:

When someone joins your team, how long does it take to get their local development environment running?

A few minutes? A few hours? A few days? Longer?

The answer to this question is a powerful indicator of one aspect of team health.

I’ve joined a large number of teams in my career, and have seen many different answers. In the worst case, it’s taken weeks to get the dev environment completely working.

Fortunately, in most cases, I was able to reduce that time for future new joiners.

Here are some things to consider with regard to your own local dev onboarding process:

• How is the process documented?
• Are all dependencies documented?
• How many manual steps does it involve?
• How recently was this process tested and documented?
• How many variations are there? Commonly I see one each for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Do you have more?
• Where do new joiners often find problems?
• How can this process be streamlined?