The start of a project catches many unprepared. You may be part of the project team from day one, but there’s a tight schedule and not enough time to fully prepare. What’s even worse is that you may overlook some of the steps to have things come back and haunt you down the road.
The project begins and after several months, you end up in the dark. The annoying things that have frustrated you in the past are occurring again. If this situation sounds familiar, keep reading. The information here can help ensure your development process is successful.
Establish Clear Communication
Beginning from day one, make sure roles of each team member are well-defined and that everyone knows who is responsible for what parts of the project. When someone needs access to external systems, clarification, or face an emergency, make sure they know who to contact. Be sure the information is in an easy-to-find location and that everyone has access to it.
Determine Best Conventions and Practices
When the project begins, don’t start coding immediately. If this happens, your codebase may become a mess that no one wants to finish or maintain.
Take time to assess past experiences and figure out what went well and what didn’t. It’s going to help you define how you want things to happen in your new project. Involve everyone on the team and listen to what they have to say.
The end result should be a list of best practices and conventions that are validated by your team. If you follow the conventions, you are going to create a much more coherent and well-organized solution.
Create a Concise Definition of “Done”
Have you ever discovered right before a demo that you can’t showcase one of the features because there’s something missing? Developers consider a feature “done” after it works on their local machine. However, the complete software development cycle requires much more than that. For software or a feature to be done, it must be checked, tested, and double-checked. You can find more about finding issues if you read more here.
Be sure you let your team members know what your definition of “done” is. If needed, create a checklist for them to use before saying anything is complete. This will provide you with more confidence that all issues are resolved.
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Select the Proper Continuous Integration System
A crucial part of every development process is continuous integration. You need to ensure you can release new developments with little effort. The good news is there are several options available to use, with some popular options being TeamCity and Jenkins. When making the decision of what to use, though, there are a few things to keep in mind.
One consideration is team preference. The other is how much the tool costs. It is a good idea to choose a continuous integration tool your team has used in the past. This ensures everyone is familiar with how it works and you won’t have to put in even more effort to learn an entirely new system.
Don’t overlook the cost of the tool, either. If you have selected an expensive tool, you may find the sponsors of the project won’t cover the cost. With so many continuous integration tools available, it shouldn’t be a problem to find one that will work for your project.
Achieving a Successful Development Project
Make sure to use the tips and information here for a successful development project. Doing so is going to pay off and help ensure you achieve the results desired for the software being created.
