Production preparation

With all the research undertaken, there was a clear idea of the path that the application should follow and the place that it should take in the market. The next step was to analyze all the research done and translate it into a production environment. Because the development of an application is a fairly big project, it was very important to plan the whole program functionality and organize everything in order to know how much time it would take, as well as deadlines and defining realistic scopes for the project.

To organize the project I used a very AGILE approach. This movement approaches development of a project in very short planning steps. AGILE proposes a development process based on the separation of development into little modules that are taken from user stories. This way, each module portrays one functionality, promoting the DOT (Do one thing, and do it well) methodology, which isn't only good when producing the module, as it promotes code without side-effects but it is also much easier to manage and see how big and how much left there is in the production of the program as a whole.

Within AGILE there is also a process management tool called SCRUM. SCRUM uses the module separation system AGILE and organizes these modules by priority as well as giving them an estimated amount of time that they will take to produce. Modules are then completed in "Sprints". A sprint is basically a set amount of time that is then filled with modules to be able to make the most out of the amount of time that the team has. For example, if one module is going to take 6 hours, the team will then look for a 4 hour module to fit the 10 hour sprint. This way it optimizes the amount of modules that can be ready for live deployment every set amount of time.

To use this methodology, I used trello.com. Trello is a service that allows to create lists and cards and move them around in a pinboard.

My Trello pinboards with Sprints looked like so:

The backlog showed all the tasks that needed to be done, and would move to the the "In Progress", "To Review" or "Done" as they were being worked on. This allows for very easy tracking of the progress of the project.

Also, each card has a color set to it. Trello uses these colors to tag cards into types. These tags normally show things like, "back end development" or "design", but I used them to showcase how much time I was expecting the task to take. As I wanted to have some sort of frame I used the Fibonacci sequence to set the amount of hour it would take me.

The color code was as follows:

  • Green: 2 hours.
  • Yellow: 3 hours.
  • Orange: 5 hours.
  • Red: 8 hours.
  • Purple: 13 hours.
  • Blue: 21 hours.