How much time to dedicate to understanding the system versus development

Hi all,

At work, we have a microservice architecture (probably 40-50 services at this point) that is worked on by probably 30ish developers. My immediate team for planning meetings etc is generally 12-15 people, pretty widely distributed among these services.

My question is inspired largely by these planning meetings. We use story points for planning (although we’re not very religious about it or anything) and use Planning Poker to assign points. However, because the team is pretty widely distributed, the stories we go over often have to do with services I have little familiarity with. It feels like a waste of time to give estimates on things that I really have no idea about, but at the same time, not voting on things makes me feel like I’m not being involved; and it might be just in my head but I sometimes perceive subtle cues that it’s frowned on not to vote on things.

I could try to dedicate an hour (or some amount of time) a day to just familiarize myself with all parts of the code base, but this feels kind of silly if I’m never going to touch the specifics of many of them. I totally see value in being comfortable with the public APIs and high level business logic, but going further than that seems like it eats away at time that could be spent developing or helping out with code reviews on the code bases I’m familiar with, etc.

In summary, my questions are these: How much time do you guys dedicate to knowing your company’s code base? How wide do you go beyond the things you actually touch?

Thanks!