My wife is due to have a baby. In fact, she’s now majorly overdue to have a baby. As an organisation, we’ve had 9 month heads up on this.
For a small(ish) dev team like ours, even with all that advance notice, it’s somewhat difficult to plan around a developer disappearing for 2 weeks at an uncertain date. The way we’ve dealt with is it is by keeping me off large projects and instead management have been throwing me various bugs, fixes and discrete small jobs as they crop up. And I have been careful to keep everyone updated on where I’m up to and to keep all my code checked in all the time in case I have to drop off the radar at short notice.
Two things have helped a lot through this – developer flexibility and code flexibility. The model of having one developer owning a client, project or piece of work wouldn’t work. All of our developers have to be able to pick up anything at short notice whether it’s adding a new module to a beautifully crafted MVC site or changing the URL of a link buried away in a static legacy site. And our code and systems have to support this too (particularly since some developers – like me – work remotely).
Right now, as we make vague plans for possible health problems across the team, knowing that we have this flexibility can only be a good thing.