You're starting a new software project. How do you make sure it's built to last?

Here are things to consider: 1. Know the scale of the future: Draw out a roadmap of what you think the product usage will grow to... 2. Know the product environment for future 3. Plan to build and test for future scale

When starting a new software project as a software project manager, defining a clear scope and setting achievable goals is crucial for project success. Additionally, ensuring that the software is built to last involves strategic planning, robust development practices, and ongoing maintenance. Here's a comprehensive guide: * Clearly outline the features, functionalities, and deliverables of the software. * Define the boundaries of the project and identify what is included and excluded. * Engage with stakeholders to understand their expectations and requirements. * Align project goals with the broader organizational objectives. * Conduct a thorough analysis of functional and non-functional requirements.

1. Planning: Invest time upfront in comprehensive planning, including defining clear objectives, requirements, and milestones. 2. Scalability: Design the software with scalability in mind to accommodate future growth and increased demand. 3. Modularity: Break down the system into modular components with clear interfaces, making it easier to maintain and update. 4. Documentation: Document code, architecture, and processes thoroughly to aid future developers and ensure continuity. 5. Testing: Implement rigorous testing procedures, including unit tests, integration tests, and user acceptance tests, to catch bugs early and maintain reliability.

There are several technical and behavioral aspects that need to be taken into account at this time. - Make sure that the development team comprehend the boundaries of the project and are agreed with its expectations is one of the most important thing during this phase. An over engineering or a "well motivated" friction in this moment could be impacting. - Having clearness about the team skills and some potential lack of knowledge may be a powerful ally to make the expected performance realistic. - Implement as best as possible the ceremonies will create a fruitable environment for the whole project situations.

1: Understand the business goals. 2: Plan for change. 3: Deliver excellence. Learn the goals of your customer to be a better partner for delivering business value. Understanding their goals is critical to your success. Business requirements will change. Features come and go. Plan for it. Technologies will change. Tooling will change. Even your team and their skills will change. Plan for the change by identifying the aspects of change and encapsulate those areas of volatility. I use the approach defined in Righting Software by Juval Lowy. Finally, deliver excellence. Apply coding standards, unit tests, automated test execution, code reviews, etc. Ensure your product delivers on the requires without defects.

As a software project manager tasked with choosing the right architecture and technologies for a new project, ensuring its longevity and durability is paramount. Here's how you can approach this: * Begin by thoroughly understanding the project requirements, including functional and non-functional aspects such as performance, scalability, security, and maintainability. * Conduct a comprehensive analysis of available architectures and technologies that align with the project requirements and constraints. * Prioritize architectures and technologies that offer scalability and flexibility to accommodate future growth and changes in requirements. * Choose architectures and technologies that promote modularity and maintainability.

Some more aspects to consider, in addition to what has already been said here: Portability: Your architecture should be as platform-agnostic as possible. The future is uncertain, and reliance on a specific platform makes your application a lot less durable. Reusability: A modular architecture coupled with standardized interfaces facilitates the reusability of your components, both within and outside the scope of your application. Team affinity: Technological and architectural choices need to consider, among other factors, the implementation team's set of skills and expertise.

1. Scalability: The architecture should accommodate growth in users or data without significant restructuring. 2. Modularity: Utilize modular components for easier updates and maintenance. 3. Tech Stack Suitability: Choose a technology stack that is robust, well-supported, and fits the project’s needs. 4. Performance Optimization: Focus on efficient processing and resource utilization. 5. Security: Integrate security best practices from the outset. 6. Maintainability: Opt for an architecture that is straightforward to understand and modify.

One of the main rules to always keep in mind when choosing the architecture design for a new software project is not only based on the current functional request by the "client" but also the evolution of the business need according to the market and competitors. In other words, your architectural design must always keep open doors to aggregate more technical functionalities. You must use your imagination and talk with teams to understand clearly what it's about and guess what it could become in the evolution manner! Be attentive with frameworks. They are made to make development easier. But you will encounter frustrations with blocking steps. Native language should be your preference! Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket.

The architecture for your solution involves evaluating factors like scalability, performance, security, and maintenance. Consider options such as monolithic, microservices, or serverless architectures based on your application's complexity and requirements. Ensure the chosen architecture aligns with your development team's expertise and supports future growth.

As a software project manager, ensuring that a new software project follows coding standards and best practices is crucial for building a sustainable and maintainable solution. Here's how you can ensure the project is built to last: * Define and establish clear coding standards that all team members must adhere to. * These standards should cover aspects such as code formatting, naming conventions, documentation practices, and code organization. * Implement a process for conducting regular code reviews to ensure that all code contributions meet the established coding standards and best practices. * Encourage collaboration and constructive feedback among team members to improve code quality.

Introducing coding conventions often helps make code from other engineers more readable. This can lead to easier pair programming and collaboration among engineers, especially across teams. When it comes to best practices, you can't force your engineers to use them. Instead, you have to teach them and create a culture where quality is fostered. Many companies have had good experiences with not enforcing standards but instead offering and demonstrating guidelines to convince engineers to voluntarily use them.

An effective way to make sure a software team follows coding standards and best practices is to collaboratively enrich them and really coach the team especially in the beginning of a team/application by doing intense code/peer reviews. Then gradually the team will develop ownership in creating software with quality. Only enforcing coding standards but not coaching the team and junior software engineers will result in bad practices.

If you can't read and understand your colleagues code and documentation we have an issue. In SW development for years doing "pair" programming and reviews helped teams to build common language. I use to define this as canonical terms, which is language that describes what all involved in the project needs to know. It's key to make sure best practices and team training on documentation is set and done so the code can live longer than the project always.

A project’s success is highly dependent on the people working on the project. They will ask the right questions find the right problems to solve and work together to build the right solution. In short, by hiring or allocating smart people.

Testing team should start as early as requirements. The shift left approach in quality engineering starts as early as requirements and design build. This ensures that requirements are testable early on. Adopt an automation framework built on AI, vs. manual test then automate. Always trace your testing to requirements to ensure 100% functional coverage. Functional testing is not enough. Non-Functional tests are also key to the success of the overall solution: did we meet the load KPI? how resilient is my solution? what is the plan for disaster? engage a security team who can do pen testing early on the project life cycle vs. waiting until the end.

Implementing thorough testing and debugging strategies from the outset of a new software project is essential for ensuring its longevity and reliability. Here's how you can ensure the project is built to last: * Establish a comprehensive testing framework that includes unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests. * Define testing standards, guidelines, and procedures that all team members must follow. * Include performance testing as part of your testing strategy to evaluate the scalability and responsiveness of the software under different load conditions. * Foster a collaborative debugging environment where team members can work together to identify and resolve issues efficiently.

An important aspect to keep in mind is that the later a bug is found, the more expensive it becomes. This is because when a developer finds a bug while coding, they already have all the details in mind and know how to solve the problem immediately. In contrast, a bug found during testing by another person will require more effort for the developer to return to the code. The situation gets even worse when a bug is found in production. To address this, it is important to adhere to the testing pyramid. This means you should have a lot of unit tests to find bugs during development, many integration tests, and fewer end-to-end tests. It's important to note that this doesn't mean end-to-end tests are not valuable.

Testing Strategies: Conduct various types of testing (unit, integration, regression) to verify code meets specifications. Utilize code review processes to enhance code quality. Implement logging mechanisms for error tracking and analysis. Debugging Techniques: Employ debugging tools to identify and resolve errors efficiently. Emphasize root cause analysis to prevent recurring issues. Foster collaboration among team members for effective debugging efforts. By integrating comprehensive testing and debugging strategies, you can identify and resolve errors promptly, ensuring the functionality, reliability, and usability of your software project.

Having team members with a designated role of testing is a residue of waterfall. Let engineers bake testing from the beginning (or even before with TDD) and adopt "you build it you run it" mindset, e.g. by rotating on-call

Documenting and communicating progress effectively throughout the lifecycle of a new software project is essential for ensuring its success and longevity. Here's how you can achieve this: * Set up clear and efficient communication channels for the project team to share updates, discuss progress, and address any issues or concerns. * Utilize project management tools to track tasks, milestones, and progress. * Generate regular progress reports summarizing key achievements, milestones reached, tasks completed, and any challenges encountered. * Keep detailed records of decisions made throughout the project, as well as any changes to requirements, scope, or timeline.

In software projects, planning is often neglected for early coding. Non-developers outline features, passing them to engineers who begin work directly. This short-term efficiency leads to long-term issues, with scattered documentation and forgotten details as the system expands. Comprehensive documentation is abandoned due to its overwhelming nature. However, by following established software engineering principles, such as starting with system context and iteratively deepening into architecture with consistent documentation and use case analysis, these issues can be prevented. Proper documentation clarifies and identifies potential problems early on.

An effective way of communicating your progress is by giving sprint reviews / demo's. A good sprint review will show which sprint (business) goals the last software cycle have delivered, how they map back to the longer term application goals and will demo to end users what software and thus value is coming. A sprint review will also allow users & stakeholders to give feedback and make sure that people experience that they have influence on what's to be built.

- Documenting Progress: - Maintain records of project information, including requirements, design, code, testing, and deployment. - Create documentation to track project status, milestones, and deliverables. - Communicating Progress: - Share project information with team members, stakeholders, and clients. - Exchange updates on project status, achievements, and challenges. - Foster transparency to avoid misunderstandings and conflicts. By documenting and communicating progress effectively, you can keep track of project milestones, facilitate collaboration, and minimize delays, ensuring the longevity of your software project.

Seeking feedback and iterating on the development process are critical aspects of ensuring that a new software project is built to last. Here's how you can incorporate these practices into your project management approach: * Create structured feedback loops throughout the development process to gather input from stakeholders, users, and team members. * Foster an environment where team members feel comfortable sharing their thoughts, ideas, and concerns. * Encourage open communication channels, active listening, and constructive feedback exchanges among team members. * Prioritize feedback items based on their impact on the project's success and feasibility of implementation.

Learned lessons often come from feedback on the project. It is revealed with these feedbacks whether the needs of the business owner are understood correctly. It is even the most effective way to explain the changes that may arise in the needs during the project. At the same time, it is thanks to these feedback shares that the very valuable advice that technical teams can give are not skipped.

Often overlooked point. Seeking feedback should be at every iteration of the project life cycle in terms of user studies, functional reviews, story boarding, workshops, design thinking sessions even before we start writing a single line of code.

Seeking feedback and iterating is fundamental in pursuing continuous improvement and innovation. By embracing a LEAN approach complemented by Agile methodologies, teams can streamline processes, minimize waste, and deliver value more efficiently. Prioritizing user experience (UX) ensures that products and services meet customers' evolving needs and preferences, fostering loyalty and satisfaction. Additionally, maintaining a relentless focus on learning from customers enables organizations to stay ahead of the curve, anticipate trends, and drive meaningful innovation. Integrating these principles into our practices empowers teams to adapt, evolve, and thrive in today's dynamic and competitive landscape.

Don't waste time "validating" with other non-users, such as management, or building high-fidelity mockups. Build and show customers as soon as possible to get feedback.

A detailed project plan and execution plan should be prepared by the PM in the initial phase of the project itself. MPP format would be really good. Preparation of the project plan should happen in accordance with the key project team members and leads. It should be reviewed and approved by the client. Subsequently it should be baselined. Further, it is highly recommended to conduct weekly review meetings with the Project core team. PM should track, monitor and update the Project plan on a weekly basis or whenever required. Then, the updated project plan need to be shared with all the key stakeholders. Any change in the deliverables, Delivery timeline due to scope change or other reasons should be captured in the PP and approved.

Establishing key aims and benefits of a project and ensuring that everyone understands those is important. Hence, “North Star” must be clear for entire team.

Every new software project will have scope creep. It will either come in the form of missed requirements, additional feature desires, changes in decision-makers, you name it. But whatever the reason you really should just plan on it. Whenever this happens the temptation to cut corners in the code vs building out the system in a proper and maintainable fashion becomes very very tempting. If you want a new piece of software that is free of technical debt, don't fall to the temptation of taking short cuts to fit the project into the original time and/or cost estimate. Be creative and find better ways to contain or reduce the scope (such as delay of non essential features). There is usually always a way!

Foster a culture wherein all the points mentioned are adhered to and strictly followed. Since it does happen that process are carved out but not implemented on the ground. The entire flow from start to end and way of working should be documented for everyone to follow and will help any new comer to the team to also the exact process instead of depending on someone to help them out.

Observability is crucial to knowing how the system behaves. Metrics regarding latencies, response codes, etc. with alerts on business degradation are key.