Development Processes and Tooling

Editor's Notes

1. To create an attack plan, you need an idea first – an idea, or a problem that you want to work on this weekend so that you can build project around it. A great idea is the first step to success. Having a brilliant idea will increase your chances of building a great application. But an idea is not enough. There’s one more thing that you need to be aware of.
2. A brilliant idea has to be complemented by a brilliant execution plan. The real value of your project will be in your execution. How you execute your idea will determine what your application is worth. And the first step to execution is building a development ecosystem that would help you along the way.
3. A development ecosystem is the tools and processes that you use during your implementation. These are the tools that will help you ship better products without a hassle. What is in your development ecosystem? Which tools or processes are you planning to use?
4. Before you start writing your first line of code, ask yourself these questions. Do not start until you feel comfortable with the answers.
5. Helps you visualize your ideas, which will increase creativity Help you get “in sync” with your team members. (red button with rounded corners) Helps you identify common usability problems easily Helps you identify workflow e.g. how does a user sign up You can show it to users or the judges and get some feedback
6. Allows you to break down work into smaller chunks Allows you to “pause” working (it will give you history) Allows you to track time spent and prioritize tasks Helps group tasks into releases (or MVPs) Helps identify task/developer compatibility Kanban board: use swimlanes such as backlog, in progress, done and done done
7. Allows you to: Maintain different versions of your product (production, development, beta etc.) Automatically backup your codebase Revert a problematic change Share code with others Make changes to code written by others Experiment with new features without interfering with working code Maintain work history
8. Master – production code Develop – code that is in development Feature branches – specific feature implementations You can stop working on a feature if things don’t go as planned, and your production code will not be affected
9. Creates a local web server Allows “live reload” of your app when a file changes Grunt focuses on configuration, while Gulp focuses on code Most practical uses: Automatic index.html generation CSS and JS minification and bundling Creating a distribution package for staging and production Most Yeoman generators include a grunt or gulp setup – pick an existing one
10. A project is a series of decisions which shape the codebase Decisions can be easily forgotten Documentation will help future team members If you release your MVP, your users will benefit from the documentation as well Keep short notes of feature descriptions and decisions GitHub, BitBucket and GitLab all come with a wiki Alternatively use Google Docs Reuse your wireframes! Keep a single document for all your team standup notes Be creative – you can record short videos as well Use Slack for team communication