Getting to Working Software Quickly

[dustinleblanc]

Prompt

Web Projects are not useful to end-users until they exist as deployed software. To ensure the best outcome for our clients, we should be aiming to get to deployed software that solves real problems as fast as possible. This decreases the likelihood that we'll blow the budget and/or timeline and allows us to work with the product owner to adjust scope with confidence that the most important things will be taken care of.

A few thoughts on how we might improve early shippability:

1. Begin Technical architecture concurrently with or before visual design, start development as soon as the architectural direction is solid enough to deliver first features. See Concurrent Design and Manufacturing and Shape Up
2. Ensure all known features are identified, estimated, and priority-sorted as early as possible. This will help us to budget for visual design and make early decisions on feature priority.

Ticket Checklist

Make sure you complete the following checklist

• [x] I'm aware of what a discussion actually entails
• [x] I've assigned this task to myself and one of the Keepers of the Faith
• [x] I've not set a story point estimation
• [x] I've selected at most two labels that best describe what part of the business this ticket improves eg sales, dev, etc

[dustinleblanc]

fwiw, just looking at this issue board right now, realized we sort of did this with Chenmed. We got a fairly functional website within a single sprint. Here is how we did that:

1. started from our template.
2. Used Radix as a starter theme (uses Laravel mix and had a great subtheme generator).
3. Pre-purchased a bootstrap 'theme'
4. Carved up that theme using the tried and true paragraphs approach
5. Migrated content that wasn't going to change data structure very quickly