add new section on culture

Codify the observations from #27 into a new section of the guidebook.

Closes #27

docs/environment/culture.md

+title: Culture and Values
+
+# Shared culture and values
+
+We, as a division, regularly meet to try and reflect on what things about our
+culture, values and ways of working are good and which need improvement. These
+meetings can be as a group or as one-to-one sessions with line managers. This
+page documents some specific observations from these retrospective sessions.
+
+## Good documentation is paramount
+
+The moment you stop working on something, details of its operation start leaking
+out of your head. Documenting processes and procedures helps guard against this.
+On multiple occasions we have had difficulties arising from the loss of a
+single-point of failure or simply that something had been forgotten over time.
+
+We discussed and developed some strategies for good documentation:
+
+1. Write the documentation you would want for yourself in six months. It is hard
+   sometimes to know who the audience of documentation is. Unless there's a
+   clear audience, write assuming that it is you who'll be re-visiting this
+   topic in six months and write the documentation you'd want to find.
+2. Merge requests can and should be moved back to rework if they do not include
+   documentation. This documentation should include good commit messages. In
+   size months time you may be staring at a line of code wishing that you'd
+   written down your thought process in a commit message at the time.
+3. When extended design work is being performed prior to implementation work, it
+   is useful if that design work can be captured and discussed at the earliest
+   opportunity. Team members should feel empowered to ask someone performing
+   high-level design to keep notes and to be willing to talk through the design
+   as they are working on it.
+
+## Keep working state in GitLab
+
+We are increasingly finding ourselves needing to be more work-from-home and
+asynchronous-friendly. To that end it is everyone's responsibility to keep state
+in a shared place. This place is usually GitLab.
+
+1. Make sure that GitLab issues contain enough information for someone to start
+   work on it. Single-line issues should be extremely rare. The issue
+   description or the comments below should reflect the discussion which
+   happened in sprint refinement.
+2. GitLab issues should be short-lived once picked up. If an issue unpicks to
+   have a number of sub-issues which weren't anticipated initially, split the
+   issue into sub-issues, close the parent issue and start work on the first
+   sub-issue.
+
+   Sub-issues should be grouped together using GitLab's "related issue"
+   mechanism.
+
+## It is OK not to know something
+
+We are a cross-product team with many difference specialisms. Do not be afraid
+in a sprint refinement session to ask for clarification on an issue if you do
+not understand the problem it is describing.
+
+Attempt to make time to explain concepts to other team members when asked.
+Explaining things is a useful transferable skill and one which we all can
+benefit from developing.
+
+If you feel that something is being designed or developed without enough context
+being recorded, feel free to open an issue and request that it be scheduled.
+
+## It is OK to claim an issue if you are less knowledgeable on it
+
+Our issue estimation process attempts to capture differing familiarity within
+the team about specific technologies. If an issue deals with a technology
+unfamiliar to you it is OK to pick it up regardless and ask for help. Please try
+to document your learning when tackling the issue as "from nothing"
+documentation is very hard to write.
+
+If you pick up an issue on a topic you are less familiar with, it is your
+responsibility to identify quickly if you have a knowledge issue which is
+blocking process and to ask someone for help. If no one can help you, place the
+issue back into the backlog and choose another.

mkdocs.yml

@@ -49,6 +49,7 @@ nav:
     - services/tls-certificates.md
     - services/undergraduate-admissions-portal.md
   - 'Working environment':
+    - environment/culture.md
     - environment/meeting-rooms.md
 
 # Links for sufficiently with it people to submit changes.