When an employee moves off a project, the last two weeks of employment are anything but productive. It is crucial during this period that the departing employee transfer all appropriate knowledge and responsibilities to the remaining members of the team. This kit should contain relevant information to simplify the transition of new members into the development team. It should address mundane issues that deal with payroll, human resources, office equipment, etc. The kit should also provide training for tools such as software configuration management tools and documentation tools.
Communication is key to minimizing redundancy in acquiring new skills within the team.
A debugger is certainly an important tool in the software development process but it is very difficult to use a debugger to track down catastrophic programming issues such as race conditions, priority inversion, and nested interrupts. Clearly, if the success of a program is predicated upon getting to market within a certain window, then team members must have the appropriate tools to allow them to efficiently develop, debug, integrate, and test the application. Buying the appropriate tools is just the first step in advancing the technical capabilities of a team. Management also needs to make sure that the development staff receives adequate training for the newly acquired tools. Also, engineers need to dedicate time to reviewing the tool and the accompanying documentation.