Thu, 08 Aug 2013
In response to a customer's request for roadmap details, and not having the
project artifacts they expected based on how they manage internal projects,
I've written up a description of the development methodology at GreatVines.
Axioms of Software Development
The GreatVines development methodology follows from a few high-level axioms,
draws from multiple software development and project management methodologies,
and makes use of modern tools for collaboration.
The axioms:
- Requirements Change
- Priorities Change
- Delivering Useful, Working Software Frequently Is Our Primary Goal
- Delivering Updates to our Software is Cheap
The first two items, changing requirements and priorities, are related, and
mean that we don't expect to be able to predict the future more than a few
months out. We generally have a good sense of which new features customers
want to make use of next month, but not those that will be most useful next
year. Additionally, as we deliver new features to customers, requirements
for enhancements to these features become apparent as we get feedback from
them.
Item 3, delivering quality software, stands on its own. These first three
items reflect what we think are the most important principles from the Agile Manifesto.
Item 4, that the delivery of updates is cheap, follows from the fact that we
are a software-as-a-service company. The days of shrink-wrapped software are
gone, and updates to both our web-based and mobile applications are delivered
without end-user intervention. Because delivering updates is cheap and
requirements change, we are able to deliver multiple iterations of new features,
and adjust requirements as we discover exactly how customers are using our
software and how they would like to use it.
Therefore, we aim to deliver useful, working software frequently under the
assumptions that requirements and priorities change regularly, and that
delivering updates to our software does not impose a large cost on either
GreatVines or our customers.
Process
We generally organize releases into three- to four-week cycles, similar to Scrum
sprints, but try to keep the next two to three releases planned as well so
we're looking two to three months down the road. Like scrum and kanban, we start
from a backlog of features that we would like to implement. We bring together
team members from development, support, implementation, and sales when
prioritizing the tasks for future releases.
Each release typically has a combination of small tasks, which may already
describe a combination of technical requirements and planned implementation
details, and larger tasks, the requirements for which need to be further
elaborated.
In preparing the bigger tasks for an upcoming release, we work to ensure the
requirements are clearly defined so development can proceed. Features that
require a new user interface or significant changes to an existing interface
are mocked up. There are often a few iterations of mockups, as questions are
raised and addressed, and the requirements and mockups updated.
Depending on the feature, we occasionally share the mockups with existing or
potential customers, and solicit their input before starting development, but
we generally prefer to implement a working interface, then adapt it as we get
feedback from real use.
As the requirements are fleshed out, we break them down into development tasks,
referencing the mockups and relevant requirements. Each task is estimated by
the developer that will be responsible for writing the code.
The tasks within a release are prioritized so if there is any slippage, the
highest priority tasks get completed first. The assignment of prioritized
tasks to developers ensures that each developer knows which task they should be
working on at any time, and helps collaboration by letting all members of
the team know who is working on what and how the priorities are defined. As in
kanban, it also limits the amount of work-in-progress.
During development, we try to ensure the quality of the software through
developer-written tests and peer review. For both our web-based applications
running on the Force.com platform, written
in Apex,
and our mobile
app, written in javascript, we make extensive use of unit tests. Although
we don't follow a test-driven
development process per se, we try to take a test-first approach with bugs;
for new features, we typically write tests either in parallel with
implementation code or subsequent to it.
We have found that testable code is better code. If it's hard to test, it's
probably poorly designed, and needs to be decomposed.
During peer review, both the tests and implementation code are reviewed. We
look for areas in which the design of the software can be improved as well as
ensuring that the code follows our internal coding conventions to ease future
maintenance.
With our mobile app, we have started writing automated functional tests as well
as unit tests. The goal is to have the tests fully specify the functionality
of the application.
When a new version has been released, our release
notes are updated.
Tools
There are a couple important tools we use to support our development process.
We use LiquidPlanner
as our project management tool. Each release is organized as a package. We
have our web-based application and mobile applications organized as separate projects,
broken down into broad features using folders within the projects. We pull
tasks from both projects into a release package.
Mockups for new interfaces that will be built as part of the release are done
at wireframe level like one would do in Balsamiq Mockups. (Our
mockups are actually often done as Google Drawings because Jim typically does
them, and he has somehow become proficient at creating them quickly as Google
Drawings.)
The use of ranged
estimates in LiquidPlanner allow us to organize releases with a fair amount
of confidence in being able to hit delivery dates. Estimating software
development tasks is a continuing challenge, but we find the confidence
interval-based approach superior to point estimates often used in project
management tools and story-point estimates used in scrum. In the backlog, we
often put wide estimates on broadly defined tasks, when it's not yet clear the
value of the information provided by more granular requirements and estimates.
When organizing a release, we break down big tasks into smaller ones, generally
around one- to six-hours. Smaller tasks are easier to
estimate more accurately, and estimates
improve with practice.
LiquidPlanner also serves as a collaboration tool, minimizing project
management overhead. As discussed above, the priority of tasks is unambiguous.
We keep estimates of remaining work on tasks up to date, and LiquidPlanner
automatically
updates the schedule. Discussion about task details happens within
LiquidPlanner so if there's a change to or clarification of requirements,
there's one place to look. (When real-time discussion is required, we
generally use Google Hangouts, then record the result of the conversation in
LiquidPlanner.) Using LiquidPlanner mostly eliminates the need for "what's the
status?" discussions.
We also track the status of code reviews and whether the code for each task has
been merged within LiquidPlanner.
We use git and GitHub for version control.
Our use of github follows how most open source projects are organized. We have
a greatvines organization, which
contains the primary repo, from which we package our software.
Each developer has a fork of the repo. Developers create feature branches for
individual
LiquidPlanner tasks, and open a pull request against the greatvines repo when
the code is ready to be reviewed. The pull request is noted in LiquidPlanner
and the task is moved to a ready-to-review package, which puts the task on hold
(not scheduled for further development).
Peer review is done within GitHub, using inline comments on the open pull
request. If the task needs further work, the task is moved out of the
ready-to-review folder in LiquidPlanner so it's scheduled for additional work.
When the pull request is merged, the task is marked done.
Future Improvements
There are a couple areas in which we are planning improvements to our
development process around testing. We are using jasmine and jasmine-jquery to do some
functional testing of our mobile app, but it's not exhaustive, and we don't
have anything similar in place for our Visualforce
interfaces. Therefore, we augment our automated testing with manual testing.
We would like to add more robust automated functional/acceptance testing,
perhaps using a browser automation tool like selenium or casperjs.
As we further automate testing, we also plan on introducing continuous
integration. Travis CI looks promising
here, with tight integration with GitHub, and extensive use among open source
projects already.
There are a couple areas in which we might experiment with changes in process
in the future. One is in choosing which features should go into each release.
We currently use a consensus building approach in which we informally consider
the value of possible enhancements to our customers. I'd like to investigate
whether there might be gains to be had from the use of more formal Decision Analysis practices.
We might also experiment with scrum-style user
stories for documenting requirements. For the most part, our lack of a
formal requirements documentation structure has not been a problem, and we are
able to turn requirements into technical designs easily. But in cases where
requirements are very broadly defined, the "As a user, I want" structure may
prove valuable. Using a standard structure may also ease on-boarding of new
employees and coordination with any contract or outsource developers with which
we work.
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