Notion Template: Software Development Health Check

The goal of this product

With this Notion template, you can check how your development team is doing. It targets focus, stress levels, mental health, teamwork and a lot more. There are three categories of questions you will go through, which are Growth, Processes and Environment. In the end, you should have a good overview of how good your team processes are defined. The goal is to find out what already works great, what might be missing and what you might be able to improve on.

Why I made this product

Hi, I'm Tobias, founder of Ice Bear Labs. I'm a freelance developer with over ten years of professional experience. I have worked with large development teams containing project managers, product owners, designers, developers etc. In a lot of those projects, the business processes were defined quite detailed.

What was often missing, was how the developing process should be handled, where information should be saved and how the team should work, on a day to day basis. Working with different teams you could always find things that did not go great in those categories.

This product is my attempt to give you a tool to find those problems and fix them for your team.

Who is this product for?

This product is for everyone that wants to check how their development team is doing and what could be improved. That can be a concerned project manager, a product owner or a development team lead. Anyone with the power to change a process and improve things for the developers is welcome to try the template.

What do you get?

The template includes

• An introduction to the topic of mental / stress awareness overall
• An overview over the "Joel Test" as a development quality test
• The actual "3 Parts Checklist", which is the Software Development Health Check. It's split into the aforementioned three categories Growth, Processes and Environment
• A guide on what to do after doing the test with your team
• Links to advanced resources with which you can work further

Here are the questions you will see:

The category Growth will guide you through questions on the teamwork within your team, your agile processes, how junior developers are guided and a lot more.

The category Processes will question you on the most technical parts of your teams work to check if you have best practices in place to ensure your developers can work as simple and fast as possible.

And the last category Environment takes a look at everything that happens around your developers, be it the actual physical environment or the typical weekday that they have to manage.

In the template you will find more detailed instructions than this. As a last note: No team is perfect and you're not supposed to score 100% on this. It's not a high school exam, it's here to explore what your team is doing, what is does well and what can be improved. I hope that in the end it helps to make your process a little better :)