Skip to main content

Awareness of Product Development


Software development can be understood simply as a program to receive inputs (i.e customer needs) and then produce outputs (i.e working software). It is worth it to know how many steps are in that program. When something gets stuck in a step, everyone is aware of that.

The first painting of my son

The General Process Big Picture

There are two main factors in this picture including the people with roles and their interactions. All people involved in developing the product know their responsibilities clearly and how to make things done right. Therefore, a good collaboration can be reached.

Product Roadmap Contribution

It would be great for developers to know what the next features to work on are as well as when those features will be delivered. Therefore, the product roadmap is very important.

The items in the roadmap should be contributed by ALL people involved in the product.

Because software engineers directly develop, test, delivery, and monitor the software, they should also contribute ideas to the roadmap.

How to contribute

- For small features, just create a User Story in the Product Backlog and share it with Product Owner (PO)

- For big features (knowns as Epic), create a document to describe it and discuss it with the PO.

Technical Consulting

The sales team, Product Manager, and PO work closely with customers. However, they are almost non-technical people. Therefore, technical consulting from Developers is needed.

Normally, the process of technical consulting consists of the following steps:

- Product Manager/Product Owner creates a document to describe the features' idea

- Developers describe the proposals including architectures and rough estimation. It is important that Developers are the ones who give the estimation directly. The Technical Architect plays the role of facilitating the team to have good proposals. Depending on the feature’s complexity, the research/spy user story should be created first.

For simple issues, technical consulting also can be simply conducted by direct communication without the need of creating a document.

Product Operation

Even though Developers do not operate and maintain the applications in the production environment, they should know how it is operated too. It will impact how the features are implemented as well as avoid some issues when running in production by implementing a good mechanism. Therefore, it requires some transparent information for them.

- A document describes the deployment views, infrastructure, practices, version, etc (i.e Confluence pages)

- Communication channels (i.e weekly catch-up)


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What the heck is Meteor DDP?

I was using Meteor for my messenger project. I was so curious about the real time connection. I wanted to know how exactly this mechanism works. In this post, I will go through the DDP Specification, an overview of WebSocket, and a simple demo about how to subscribe a publication of Rocket.Chat (containing a DDP server) from an external webpage. At a glance, I knew that Meteor invented a protocol called DDP which uses for handling real time connection. So then, what is DDP? "DDP (Distributed Data Protocol) is the stateful WebSocket protocol that Meteor uses to communicate between the client and the server." [1] All right! Why does DDP matter? "DDP is a standard way to solve the biggest problem facing client-side JavaScript developers: querying a server-side database, sending the results down to the client, and then pushing changes to the client whenever anything changes in the database" . [2] In order to understand deeply the protocol, I decided ...

Strategy Design Pattern

For example, I have a program with an Animal abstract class and two sub-classes Dog and Bird. I want to add new behavior for the class Animal, this is "fly".  Now, I face two approaches to solve this issue: 1. Adding an abstract method "fly" into the class Animal. Then, I force the sub-classes should be implemented this method, something like: public abstract class Animal{ //bla bla public abstract void fly(); } public class Bird extends Animal{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.println("Fly high"); } } public class Dog extends Animal{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.println("Cant fly"); } } 2. Creating an interface with method "fly" inside. The same issue to an abstract class, I force the classes these implement this interface should have a method "fly" inside: public interface Flyable{ public void fly(); } public class Bird implements Flyable{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.pr...

Journal: This Month I Learned (2022-Nov)

This Month I Learned posts are aimed to share what I have learned during the month such as my thoughts, recommend resources, tips, how-to, and so on. Vung Tau beach Engineering Levels I conducted a lot of meetings with HRM to define the standards for evaluation criteria, career path ladder, Personal Appraisal (PA) processes, and onboarding/offboarding processes. I knew more about the expectation from an HRM perspective for engineering levels evaluation criteria. For example Define many enough titles for a long career path development Define general criteria for each level How to calculate score when evaluation with weight matrix applied Anticipate risks before executing a process Team Engineering Lead Organization I collected ideas from different people When having no dedicated leader, every member of the team has a fairly chance to practice leadership skills Scalability strategy: development teams’ size, and new position nomination. Security Awareness Training I conducted this sharing...

Automating deployment and managing apps on OpenShift

Previously, we maintained OpenShift templates for deploying apps in development environments as well as delivering these templates to our customers for their on-prem deployment. Customers who refer to our templates (as well as documentation) have their own configuration management tools to automate the deployment such as ArgoCD and FluxCD. My son's buildings Our developers usually modify templates (YAML) directly on OpenShift for testing and then adjust the corresponding templates stored in the Git repository in Bitbucket. This sometimes causes an issue that delivered templates are incorrect because: - Developers forget to update the templates in Git repositories. - Developers don’t test the templates Therefore, our goal was to integrate a tool into our CI/CD that can automate and manage the configuration of OpenShift apps. The delivered templates should be the ones that are able to run on our OpenShift with the following purposes: - Automate deployment from templated in Git repos...

Merging source in SVN

My team has used Primefaces for our projects. We sometimes have several branches of the projects with a new Primefaces's release. For example, we currently have a project with two branches, a branch for using Primeface 4.0, a trunk for using Primeface 5.0, and we are working these parallel branches. Our project looks like the following: - myProject - branches + primefaces4 + tag + trunk (primefaces5) My problem is how to copy the same source from the trunk to the branch "primefaces4". That is where SVN Merging can help! Here is the steps those I have conducted in my project. Step 1 : open the project with the branch "primefaces4" Step 2 : Team > Merge... Chose the trunk's URL. For example: http://192.168.9.10/svn/myProject/trunk Step 3 : Select the revision from "trunk" to merge. For example: +--revision--+--date--------+--author----+--comment---+ +  10        + 03.10.2014 + vanhuong   + f1: part 3 + +  9     ...