I wrote this a while back and had it archived on a Backpack page.
Since I’ve never done anything with it, thought I might as well post it here.
The ideas are very similar to Getting Real by 37 Signals, though I don’t nearly flush them out as well.
Note: I wrote this after being frustrated at a few companies; I’ve since worked for some pretty cool teams that have actually adopted many of these ideas, under different names / etc (agile, XP, Getting Real, etc).
How Webapp Developers Can Get More Done: GTD++
GTD++ is a collection of applied technologies and frameworks for agile, sustainable application development.
Systems
- Version Control
- Bug, Task & Feature Request Tracking
- One-step Builds
- Unit Testing
- Wiki / Knowledge Management
- Automatic Documentation Extraction
- Continuous Integration
- Automated Application Testing (Web, GUI, etc)
Laws of GTD++
- Any ongoing process which relies upon the physical proximity of team members is inherently broken.
- Any system that routinely relies upon verbal or message-based (non-captured) knowledge transfer for critical development work is inherently flawed.
- Any process that can be automated in a functionally equivalent manner—should be automated.
- Stakeholders should always be made aware of the implications of their requests (functionality-wise, schedule-wise, etc)
- Stakeholder Corollary: Stakeholders will not always know what they truly want without developer feedback.
Development / Production Stages
- Experimentation
- Incubation
- Rapid-growth (agile development)
- Quality-assurance
- Maturation
- Sustainable++
Absolute Bare Minimum a Developer Needs to Get Started
- A version control login and URL
- How to Checkout the Source
- How to Setup the Development Environment
- How to Setup the Build Environment
Absolute Bare Minimum Deployment Documentation
- How to Setup the Deployment Environment
- How to Deploy the Application
GTD++ Tools
Cross-platform
- Subversion
- Trac
Java
- Ant
- JUnit
- Javadoc
.NET
- NAnt
- NUnit
- NDoc
Ruby
- Rake
- Test::Unit
- RDoc
- WATIR
Python
- SCons
- PyUnit
- pydoc
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