Ask HN: Do you use RFCs internally?

[mrngilles]

Do you use RFCs internally at your company to discuss new features / projects or big changes ?

I'm thinking not just about very formal processes, but also simple documents that could be shared within a small team for the members to review before a meeting for example.

Do you have a process in place ? Tooling ?

I'm wondering how to make the process better here

[0x6A75616E]

We do, and it works well.

We put all RFCs in a dedicated single repository. The initial submission of an RFC is a merge request. The review and approval process is similar to that of a code MR. The same happens to subsequent updates to the RFC.

RFCs are versioned internally. But, since we're pretty small, most are still 1.0.

Our team is only under 10, so I haven't thought about the details of scaling this up to larger or multi-team environments. However, I don't think it'd have issues scaling as long as ownership and vision are clearly defined.

[mrngilles]

Are there any issues you've encountered with this process at your scale ?

[0x6A75616E]

It was difficult to get some folks onboard. Writing RFCs is not always fun work. I used the Swift lang repo as a source of inspiration.

It's also tougher to think about all edge cases, and details upfront. But, it's best to pay the price early than having to rebuild something that's already done (wrong).

[travelton]

Similar to the other commenter, here at Teleport, we implemented an RFD process that works quite well. It's documented here, https://github.com/gravitational/teleport/blob/master/rfd/00...

[tucaz]

I think a lot of companies use them but with a different name: Project Briefs or Project Scope.

Assuming I understand what you meant which is putting into paper what one want to do so it can be discussed, modified and approved.

Not many big companies will move forward with projects without one.