As an IT web developer I write mostly process automation code and reporting for all departments in the company (IT, Legal, HR, Engineering, Tech Writers, Finance & Accounting, Marketing, etc).
However, some other departments also have small programming teams (Engineering, HR and Marketing) which do some department specific work which is part of their "core job".
For instance marketing maintains our external website and therefore needs some graphic artists and HTML/CSS/JS developers to implement it. HR has a dedicated staff that only works with our salary/payment system as it's highly confidential. Engineers automate some debugging/testing with scripts that require advanced engineering knowledge to make.
How can you draw the line between which projects these small, expert, non-IT teams should handle and which IT should handle? Are there best practices or a list of criteria that could be used?
This issue is both political and technical, but I'm looking for best practices and the ideal way to draw the line, not political considerations.
You should draw the line based on the org chart and expected responsibilities, the more you can reference existing org documents the better. Examples, Marketing is doing front end work for the company website, but IT should be in charge on an internal intranet site.
Your org docs should already have IT in charge of internal information systems, perhaps HR is the exception with the need for privacy. That exception would provide the boundary for you, anything not contained in the exception is the roll of IT and not HR. They work on their code base and hold the keys to their database. But if the systems the code and database run on need tweaking that should be IT and should be in line with company wide standards.
Using this example something like optimizing part of the network for the Engineering team would be easy to answer. That is an IT job. Optimizing a test case would fall to Engineering. Code for backing up and encrypting Financial data is IT's responsibility, you don't need to know what the information is really, just it's basic properties. Writing code to analyze Financial documents would go to someone within Finance, because access to sensitive documents would be needed, etc.
Related
I know that some website are applications, but not all websites are applications (albeit maybe just a brochure viewing site)
Is there an in depth dummy use case for a brochure type site which would be beneficial to use.
When it comes to a corporate front facing website for example I suffer from feature blindness, although for an actual database driven application (for example a purchase order system) I feel within my element.
Is there any resources that can help me view "brochure" sites in the same light than I do with a pro bono database driven applications.
This is really useful thread. I have always battled with use cases for brochure sites, despite totally espousing the use of UML... I often feel caught between UX agency outputs & trying to ensure the whole Requirements Spec ties together, especially when agencies tend not to use UML.
There are several use cases that do apply beyond view menu / view brochure page - site functionality like print page, search site etc, sometimes accept a cookie to view specific content - but not much on classic brochure-ware. (All that ties well into user journeys / personas without having to restate the UX deliverables)
However, once using a system eg a CMS to create the website content - then I think the use cases get properly useful (as per comments above), as there are not only (usually) several actors inc the system, but also varying cases per content type so you can reference those UX deliverables without duplication and start filling in the gaps, plus tie up content strategy type deliverables (eg workflow & governance) by looking into the business processes and the system / user interactions. At the end of the modelling & specifications, you can get useful test matrices this way; plus class diagrams that relate objects to taxonomies (more agency deliverables to tie together in Functional Rqmts / Specs stage).
That's the way I'm trying to tackle it these days.
Use Cases can be used to model requirements of a system. System is a structure with input and output mappings. So if you have a static web page, you cannot interact with it in a other way than to view it.
As discussed in comments, if you think you did not understood the goals of stakeholders (what that word document sent by your boss ment...), you have to ask more and find them, use cases are a good technique for this.
In a cycle, discover actors (systems and roles interacting with the system you have to develop) and use cases (what needs of those actors the developed system should ssatisfy). Every time you find an actor, you may ask what other needs (possible use cases) he has and when you find an use case, you should ask who will participate in it and who is interested in it (who is the next actor and who are the stakeholders). Then you can define the scope boundaries and prioritize...
I would like to design a Inventory system. Some key features listed below.
Multi User
Multi Branch
Support Online and offline Invoicing
Multi Currency
Language requirements : -
C# 2.0
SQL2005 Server
I appreciate your valuable suggestions and ideas to design perfect Inventory system.
If you have any Database sample model to design such a system please don't hesitate to inform me.
Thanks.
You have some of your requirements listed here, but you do not have enough information to complete a design of an invoicing system, plus you have an unrealistic goal of a perfect inventory system - what is perfect for one person is imperfect for another; I'd settle for aiming for best of breed if I were you.
Do you have access to your customers? If you do, you need to sit down with them and find out what they want. A good way to do this is to model their working processes. Write down what steps they do from start to finish, and what influences their work (known as external actors or interfaces). This is a long process, but will end up with you being able to state exactly what is done, when, and in what order, plus the functional and non-functional constraints on the system.
Once you have this information, actually designing the physical system is relatively straightforward. Good luck.
[Big hint] The process I have described here makes heavy use of UML.[/Big hint]
For example team A and team B are working on different applications that need to implement a similar feature. The feature in question relies on a database and the database is under the control of team B. Even though the user interfaces of the two applications are based on different technologies, the functionality is supposed to be roughly the same. Both teams have their own requirements and design documents. The functionality can be changed based on feedback from either team but then both teams have to update their requirement and design documents.
The teams are geographically distributed and members of each team itself are also geographically distributed. Both teams work with the same client entity but different people. Each team has their own business analyst (requirements specialist).
I am trying to make the technical communication between the teams more formal than email so that we can avoid misunderstandings.
How do you make sure that if team B changes the database and or the feature functionality, the other team gets properly notified about it? Do you use some formal text based documents such as interface contracts? Can you share any templates for those? Or do you use some other mechanism?
A couple of things from my own experience (which sounds very similar to yours)
You should try and have a single design document for the database part of the solution which as djna suggests should be posted on a wiki or similar, with a defined public contract for interaction with the data. This is a good step in the right direction, as it will give everybody a kind of 'shared vision' which helps people converge towards doing the right thing. The contracts should try to ensure that the data access is done in a standardised way.
However, from experience, the code does not always follow the spec exactly, so i would also assign a single owner from one of the teams, whose responsibility is the integration of both systems to the database.
i would then implement a continuous nightly build process with tests, and this build should include the database. This will hopefully flag any issues earlier in the process.
From the project i worked on, you may still have occasional disagreements and breakdowns, eventually we merged both teams. This was the best solution of all for us!!
Hope this helps a little
What about having a Team site (both as one team) or a Wiki so that both teams are aware of the change.
Regular stand-up meetings. Via a conference call. Stand-up == brief, highly focused, information centered. Delegate discussion to individual discussion outside meeting, reporting back at next.
There does need to be an overall authority though, to mediate where agreement cannot be reached and to ensure overall solution integrity.
I agree with Wiki or other collaborative site for publishing the current reality.
Whereever I have looked, the functional specifcations are some sort of documents with the requirements/proposed features represented and elaborated. I was recently in a position to make a standard template for our company for functional specifications.
The format I have settled for, tentatively, is an excel file with a quite a bit of automation.
The template plans to link top level requirements to lower level requirements in a hierarchy.
The lower level requirements can then be mapped to the technical aspects of the design, similar to the house of quality. The corelation is idetified as in the HOQ, but in addition, for each pair of requirements and technical aspect, a feasibility is estimated.
If any of the technical aspect for a requirement is marked as non-feasible, the requirement is flagged for reconsideration.
After all requirements are either flagged feasible or removed appropriately, each requirement-technical aspect pair is extracted and estimations sought for each of them in terms of time and budget.
The estimations help us in planning the project.
Can I have an informed opinion about this proposal? This seemed to me the best way to link requirements with technical aspects and then to project planning.
In my experience the functional specification was generally a use case document (with or without a corresponding diagram or diagrams). The spreadsheet sounds pretty cool, but functional requirements are generally for communicating with the business stakeholders with the goal of obtaining agreement and ultimately sign-off so the project's budget can be approved. Unless your spreadsheet can somehow format the requirements for print output, I'm a bit confused as to how you propose to share the contents for discussion and feedback.
My two cents...
Hope this helps,
Bill
You might want to add a mapping between low level requirements and tests (like "design test", not "unit test".
That way you can establish a broad functional testing coverage needed for that project.
"Can I have an informed opinion about this proposal?"
Who are your users for this spreadsheet?
What do your users do with this spreadsheet? What are their use cases for requirements gathering, planning and project approval?
If you are the user, then it's perfect for you.
If you are not the user, you need to meet with your users, determine the following:
What actions do the users of requirements take? Do they approve, reject, confirm, deny?
What decisions do they make?
What information do they need to make those decisions?
If your spreadsheet meets your users needs, then it's good.
Requirements are slippery things and must be reprioritized and reconsidered in very many ways. Too much spreadsheet automation can be a hinderance.
Mostly, folks need to be able to add an unlimited number of extra columns and sort them into innumerable organizations and reorgnizations.
You may need a supplemental to the spreadsheet for listing use cases and any user interface specs.
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We need to involve our customer development partners in our development process. We're more or less following Agile methodologies. Some customer partners are remote, others closer. We need to minimize travel costs.
Our customers are in health care and tend to be busy, expensive, and hard to schedule.
What practices and technologies have worked to support customer involvement? We're using phone calls, phone conferences and email. We're curious about leveraging wiki techniques and would love to hear what's worked for others.
it doesn't matter whether the customer is in the same cubicle or halfway around the planet, except for communication delays - the critical factor is availability.
a customer that is too busy to answer your emails for several days is going to cause your iteration to be late, or fail
the customer has two critical commitments for agile:
available to answer questions in a timely manner
not to change their mind/priorities during an iteration
the customer must commit to a reasonable service-level agreement (SLA) on availability, e.g. 1-hour response time, or 24-hour response time, etc., and you will need to adjust all estimates and schedules by the lag factor. If the customer will not commit or does not follow through, cancel the iteration and re-plan, bringing the customer's commitment to the forefront again. Do not just "guess" at what you think the customer might want.
Bottom line: without a customer commitment, agile will not work.
My experience with Agile methods is mostly for desktop applications. When our customers are remote, we've spent time to get an engineer to the customer site to configure/install a demo rig. The engineer works with the customer on a test and demo setup/plan that will provide an environment that the customer believes replicates the important aspects of the deployment environment but isolates the demo system from existing infrastructure (so that we can push updates whenever we need to). The engineer also sets up deployment systems to move our applications into production, so that we can "deploy" without being on site. Our applications can self-update (either for each release or each build) and we carefully instrument the releases to log all errors and submit all crashes as bugs to our bug tracker. This way we at least know what went wrong, even if we don't know what's going right.
For each release/build that shows up on the customer's test rig, we provide a (short) screencast, narrated by the project lead or primary developer, demo-ing any new features. The release notes contain any long-term issues or questions we want the customer to think about (i.e. issues that can't be resolved immediately by a phone call or email), and the application displays these notes for the user.
Finally, and possibly most importantly, we get the customer and/or the customer's liaison an account on our calendar server and configure their calendar app to make use of that account. This then goes both ways--we can schedule time (on site, phone, email, etc.) with the customer and they can do the same with our developers.
One option: Install a customer proxy at the "customer partner" site who can extract the information that you need when those customers are available. Have these proxies build the solid relationships that allow them to represent the customer view. Their time is all yours. And when questions arise that they cannot answer, they have ready access to your customer partners - even if in the coffee line.
The whole point of the customer in agile is to have open and free discourse with the developers (IE immediate feedback). If your actual customers cannot provide this, then you need an intermediary/proxy that can fill this role. You don't need actual customers, you just need someone that can represent the customers' interests well enough to meet your customers' needs.
Just a few ideas:
If you do choose to use a Wiki, make sure it supports a whole-wiki-wide "recent changes" list, and preferably one that is specific to the users. The less distant from development people are, the more likely to have email as a metaphor for their computer use. If they can't immediately tell when there's something new for them to see, they will never explore it. You also preferably need ways to signal to them that you need their attention to matters, or they will treat changes like CCs.
I'm a big believer in creating video screen captures of interactions (narrated) and distributing them to users. Unlike a real demo, customers don't feel like they need to interrupt, and they can rewind and re-watch the same interaction over and over, paying attention to little details.
Finally, if you do distribute prototypes, make sure to send someone (or at least a screen sharing session) to see how the prototypes are used. Contextual design is effective. You can count on people using your prototype differently from the way you expect, and you have to understand how they use it to really understand where the issues are, even if they don't report them.
Have you considered something like LogMeIn.
This would allow customers to either log-in to a PC on your network already running your application, or alternatively allow you to install/update the application on one of their computers.
This would solve the remote customer issue and would also support the ongoing continual customer feedback requirement in the agile process.
I used it a previous company for technical support, but there is no reason (except maybe cost) that it would not work for your situation.
It is also a great way to actually see how users are using your application and therefore find out what works and what doesn't.
First of all, make sure that you have a product manager or a product owner close the the developers. This person will be managing the relationship with the customer.
Then, the product manager can demonstrate the product to the customer at the end of each iteration and also ask customers question when the developer need feedback to implement a user story.
It is amazing the positive feedback you can get from customers when you involve them.
We did not use a wiki and most of the communication is done via E-Mail, phone, and a screen sharing application (we are using GoToMeeting, but there are tons of alternative out there).
You should probably do a kick-off once with everyone at one place. Face-to-face time is invaluable. That includes all developers. Prepare some metaplan questions, but also have enough time to just mingle.
I think by most definitions of Agile processes that have high dependence on customer involvement you've already missed "best practice", which would be for an on-site, and preferably "in-team" customer present at all times. So I suppose we're looking for a "next-best practice". :)
There's the possibility of introducing a "proxy customer" on-site. I have to admit to being very sceptical about the value of a proxy customer. I'm concerned about the risk of introducing some sort of second-rate and otherwise unnecessary business analyst function to the mix, with the increased signal-to-noise ratio and potential for garbled messages. It also carries the risk of allowing busy real customers to reduce their involvement in the process, which is likely to lead to dissatisfaction. I wonder if there might be someone with good domain knowledge who has recently retired and might be available to act in this capacity as a consultant?
Communication bandwidth with remote customers is astonishingly lower than face-to-face, something I had not fully realised until I started dealing with users in another country. Even with video the loss is significant.
How long are your iterations? How hard is planning iterations? Might it be easier to go for longer iterations and get more planning done less frequently, or reduce iteration length and go to smaller, but more frequent planning sessions? Are more than one customer involv
Do you have a useable and available build at the end of each iteration? Is there time for involved users to have hands-on time before the next planning session? Keeping users engaged by shipping frequently would seem on the surface to be a Good Idea, which perhaps legislates for small frequent iterations (a week? two weeks?)
The wiki idea might work: have you looked at the FIT Framework? It's a sort of integrated acceptance test/wiki, which might help in getting acceptance tests from remote customers. I think I'd also look to provide some sort of (separate or integrated) "project dashboard", possibly pushed regularly to key customers as well as available on demand. use it as a substitute for things like post-its on whiteboards, Big Visible Charts and the like. There are a number of open-source or low-cost options that may serve - writing your own simple alternative need not be too time-consuming or costly, either.
Above all, remember that "Agile" is a kind-of catch-all label for developments that are carried out with an emphasis on the values and principles espoused in the Agile manifesto. What is considered "best" in one situation may not be so in another. If you understand the principles and regularly review your methods with a critical eye then you're probably going to be close enough to the best practice application to your situation.
I haven't looked at it for some time but with Beck and Fowler on the author list, there should be something useful in Planning Extreme Programming.
In my previous position #drchrono.com I aggregated data/feedback/iteration requests from 20,000 clinicians across the country. The best way to do this is to to evangelize a site like uservoice.com. I held "daily live web demonstrations" with sometimes 50 to 100 doctors (doctors signed up right from our website). In these demos I would demonstrate our current product and evangelize user voice to drive their feedback into a useful tool for our development team. All of this was done remotely and led to a 1,400% overall increase in recurring revenue growth.