Starting a Product Engineering Project

A brief walkthru on some of the approaches to start and track a development project, whether it is a freelance or client-led, or corporate project. And discuss what product engineering practices from Lean and Agile methods can be useful to hacktivate the efforts of a project.

Transcript

1. Starting a Product Engineering Project @alertboxinc 3/12/2016 Plan and track a development project closer to your code
2. Kind of projects that you deal directly with the client Client-led Projects
3. Kind of projects that you deal directly with a Product Manager / Lead Corporate Projects
4. Kind of projects that you deal yourself Pet Projects
5. Kind of projects that you deal directly with the tech community Open Source Projects
6. To get shit done you need a plan with a deadline A Plan without a Deadline is just a Fairy Tale
7. Constraints Scope Time Budget / Cost and keep Quality as a CONSTANT!
8. Requirements Purpose Scope Target Audience Technology Requirements / API Deployment Resources Budget and document EVERYTHING!
9. Timeline Establish a Delivery Plan Breakdown of Tasks Guesstimate the Work Milestones Contributors and Specialized Skills and always tell LONGER than you THINK!
10. You wouldn't want to start coding then f ind out everything all wrong Solving 80% of the original problem for 20% of the effort is a major win
11. Decompose requirements to: - Collection of features - Have a background - Outline scenarios - Add examples Creating a Backlog
12. Planning Porker is better with: - Bananas - T-shirt Sizes - Days Guesstimating the Work
13. Set a price for the entire project scope what resources going to do for exactly what price: - Fixed - Time-and-material / Hourly Budgeting the Work Resources Scope Time
14. The Lean Series Biggest mistake of all time is jump straight to coding
15. Validate uncertainties and riskiest elements: - Concierge - Wizard of Oz - Fake Doors MVP Learn Measure Build Lean UX
16. Design Final Result Look & Behave Compose Wireframes / Mocks Steal From Best Components and always get the APPROVAL!
17. Abraham Lincoln, An Accomplished Wrestler Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I'll spend the first four sharpening the axe
18. Demo Build Sprint 
 Backlog Product 
 Backlog Tracking the work of the team: - First-responders - Features teams work best - Self-organized - Small and focused Agile / Scrum
19. The amount of energy one must put in before start getting something back First task is to bring down the hacktivation energy
20. Minimal-standard Tools for Managing Projects Website Message Forums / Mailing Lists Bug Tracking Version Control Real-time Chat Wiki and document EVERYTHING!
21. Everyone has their own work f low: - Set up dev environments - Research similar projects - Set up branching strategy - Set up a deployment strategy Coding