Software Project Health Check: Best Practices and Techniques for Your Product [Webinar]

Software Project Health Check:
Best Practices and Techniques
for Your Product
Prepared by Artemiy Firsov

 MANAGING EXPECTATIONS VS. REALITY
 DYNAMIC PRIORITIZATION OF FEATURES
 KNOW CLIENT’S PROBLEMS BEFORE THEY KNOW IT
 TECHNICAL MEASURES FOR A HEALTHY PRODUCT
 USE DATA FOR DECISION-MAKING
 TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT
 INTEGRATION AND CUSTOMIZATION OPENNESS
 Q&A
Today’s Agenda

Managing
Expectations vs.
Reality

CLEAR USE CASES AND SOW
MILESTONES WITH ETAs
KNOW WHO WORKS FOR YOU 
Managing Expectations vs. Reality
1
2
3
BUDGET
4

 Define budget
 Define objectives
 Define acceptance testing cases
 Set ground truth for every stakeholder
 Do that for each initiative in your product
1. CLEAR USE CASES AND SOW

 In software development, usually hours = $
 Keep in mind deployment, acceptance
testing, contingency, documentation, auto-
testing, etc.
 Track your operating costs like subscriptions,
cloud hosting, provider fees, etc.
2. BUDGET

 Allow for planning a budget burn rate
 Set expectations for everybody, but more
importantly for the team
 Increase motivation
3. MILESTONES WITH ETAs

 WHO works on WHAT project for how much
FTU during what PERIOD
 Define teams
 Personal approach – aligning employee
expectations with the reality of the product
4. KNOW WHO WORKS FOR YOU 

 Great mockup and scoping tool
 Automation, formulas, timeline tracking,
more flexible than JIRA and requires less onboarding
 Issue tracking system for tasks and epics as well as
initiatives tracking with timelines
 Great tool for tracking data that does not fit anywhere
else, allows quick prototyping of metrics
 Allows granular tracking of different project variables
but requires deep knowledge of how to use it
Some Tools That Help With That

Dynamic
Prioritization of
Features

ONGOING MARKET REVIEW
 What is offered?
 How is it offer?
 How that corresponds with
global trends?
LISTEN TO EXISTING CLIENTS
 Offer feature requests along
with support
 Develop a protocol to prioritize
client requested features,
keeping them in the loop
 Offer paid customizations based
on urgency
EMBRACE THE TEAM
 Perform brainstorming session
 Allow every member of the
team to define the product
Dynamic Prioritization of Features
Spend some time for R in R&D to answer these questions – how new technologies can be used/enhanced in our product?

• Defines specific milestones
planned using available
resources, SoW, budget
• Can be planned by month /
quarter / year
• Allows aligning the team
on the upcoming plans and
ease the next initiative
scoping
• Prioritizing based on client
needs, product plans, and
criticality
• Defines strategic plans for
several years ahead
• Increases motivation and
shapes both backlog and
roadmap
ROADMAP PRIORITIZED BACKLOG VISION
Dynamic Prioritization of Features

 All of these tools are useful here, too
 Structured documentation

Know Client’s
Problems Before
They Know It

LOG SYSTEM ARTIFACTS
 Backend logging
 Frontend logging
 Promote logging to the team
 Teach BAs and Support to read technical logs
Know Client’s Problems Before They Know It
 How your servers are doing
 How your software and tools are doing
 How your endpoints are doing
 How your clients are doing
MONITORING

 Ability to reproduce, record, and receive
technical data from user's browser
 Monitoring tools

Technical Measures
for a Healthy Product

Technical Measures for a Healthy Product
 Use automated deployment
 Store your infrastructure as code
CI/CD
 Track the debt
 Use online code checkers to find issues early
 Plan for it on your roadmap
TECHNICAL DEBT
 Document and support your test cases
 Automate your test cases
 Build out testing protocols for different events
QUALITY ASSURANCE

 Automate tests
 Tests documentation and support
 Code repository and CI/CD
 Code checkers

Each project is unique. Yet, here are some examples
of how you can leverage data.
 Set actionable goals based on data:
• We need X users to cover Y costs
• The feature should be delivered by M to win
client N
• We need to add K FTUs to the team L from the
team O to deliver the project P by T
 Track task types to understand commodity tasks
SoW
 Build regular reports with work type / initiative
time spent breakdown to adjust the vector of
the workforce
 Build instruments for your employees to track
their time and effort
Use Data for Decision-Making

Use Data for Decision-Making
 Jira projects store product module related tasks
 Epics within projects – initiatives and features
 Components are used to group support and
operational tickets
 Such approach allows you to get the stats per
module per initiative weekly, track support
efforts, etc., and adjust accordingly depending
on the situation
REAL-LIFE EXAMPLE

 Encourage initiative and responsibility
 Allocate working hours for education, learning by
doing
 Make sure each member of the team knows
business and tech domain basics
 Encourage sharing and preserving knowledge
 Learn lessons based on the practice
 Elaborate on the protocols for engagement with
external teams
Training and Development

Training and Development
 Move DM communication to group chats, and
better to emails, and better to ticketing
platform, and better to the knowledge base
 Ask team to write detailed worklogs in KB if the
work is not reported anywhere else
 Allow developers to participate in business
analysis and prototyping
 Create onboarding materials and online guides
for both clients and team members
 Run retrospective meetings and demos
REAL-LIFE EXAMPLES

Integration and
Customization
Openness

 Open APIs
• Allow others to build upon your
technology
 Offer paid customizations
• Allow receiving additional
investments as well as extend the
feature set of the product
 Adopt Low-Code
• Ease the customizations and
integrations by implementing low-code
capabilities
 Build up community, bring new ideas, and
invite customers
Integration and Customization Openness

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Thank You!
+1 (847) 559-0864
sales@velvetech.com
www.velvetech.com

Software Project Health Check: Best Practices and Techniques for Your Product [Webinar]

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