Project Management. Project Creation Phases Overview.

Boitean Sorin PM / Drupal Developer

Features of successful projects

A good vision of how the project should look like Workflow planning (Agile Development) Tasks delegation, workload balancing between team members A good organized technical structure for fast and quality design and development. Resources (time, money, people)

Workshops Efficiency
Plan the workshop (define, attendees, location, agenda). Provide exact questions to client. Keep the balance between asking questions and exposing the proper thoughts upon smth, this will keep the client active and not annoyed. Try to build overall sitemap and go through the each level of hierarchy establishing the relationships between functionalities. Provide exact technical implementations on the fly if possible, allowing the client to choose between them. Try to identify the most complex sections and work on them before the workshop. Use existent portfolio to show the boarding of similar situations.

Design, Wireframing Phase

Start build first sketches at workshops with client on paper when needed to represent the a specific functionality where appear questions. Might be applied only for specific pages and has to be done quickly, without transforming the workshop into wireframing cycle Low fidelity / High fidelity Wireframes.
Mockups Prototypes Depending on budget you can cut Wireframing and Prototypes process, having almost ideal vision about the project.

Reuse graphical elements as much as possible to keep consistency and make developers live easier

Development Practices
Add the code/ custom modules you may consider useful for future projects to a global repository in order to re-use them and minimize dev time. Use Features, Make File, Drush, GIT Create mobile teams that work side by side always discussing problems and solutions, located physically in the same place Try to see the functionality(functions) that maybe reused in the same project (fields, content-types, views, panels etc). Will reduce time for optimization

Use Agile to Minimizes feature creep by developing in short intervals resulting in miniature software projects and releasing the product in mini-increments.

Perfect Deployment never exists, but

Tell you family that youll have a hard working night letting them know to ping you from time to time not to let you fall asleep. Big release deploy should happen in night. Plan the Deployment steps on paper, analyze the risks and possible solutions share with team and client when needed. Get approval. Make sure of all 3rd parties solutions youve got and start granting access to the production environment (Keys, IP addresses, Firewals etc). In many cases devs forget to make that and it leads to functionality crashes or deploy postpones. Dumps, dumps, dumps. Make as much as possible on each step, at each deploy check the integrity of a dump each time (make double copies). Proceed with overall testing of key functionalities personally do not believe tester even he says all is fine. There are some hidden functionalities that needs dev testing (such as SMS gateways).

Get ready for quick fixes next morning.

Testing Process
Get common with objectives / prepare test cases. If objectives are not clear ask developer to prepare a use case with expected results. Process and reporting try to organize the way you report the issues, use templates (Who?(Basic customer role) What? (Get s an white screen) Where? (http://. , screenshot)). Track results try to find dependencies or logic why it happens so for better issue reporting.

Proceed with Unit Testing for specific functionalities (ex. Social login).
Load testing (perform load tests on staging environments that are out of the same network). Security Testing (starting with specific zones access for specific roles)

Client Case. 10 days Go Live!

1 Workshop goals definition, style guides. Sitemap Established concept and navigation structure for the team. Mockups phase only. 1 iteration. Establishment of key pages - design process 2 Days. Templates. Signoff. Functionality reuse. General style re-use based on Design templates. Unit Testing process. Fast Deploy due to GIT/ Acquia.

Questions?

sorin.boistean@wearepropeople.com