Principles for manufacturing web applications

Principles.md

Principles

All problems come from humans.

TL;DR

You need a vision and a leader.

Team behaviour

• Well defined vision for the project
• A Bridge (leader) who has expertise both in humans and in software manufacturing - a must for critical projects
  • Human problems
  • Technology decisions
  • Business challenges
• Areas of expertise
  • Software architect
  • UI/UX designer
  • Backend developer
  • Frontend developer
  • Automated and manual testing
  • Content editor (media, translations)
  • Account administrator at infrastructure and other service providers
  • Maintenance (DevOps, monitoring)
• Well oiled internal communications (Clubhouse, Yac, Slack instead of emails)
• Separating design and coding
• Paying back technical debt from the very first month (at least 1 full day every month)
• Going back one step when humans must touch production environments
• Operating transparently, having a public roadmap, changelog and status page (stackshare.io)

Infrastructure

• Specialized infrastructure and other service providers
• All Hungarian service providers are blacklisted
• Avoiding installation of new major version releases of any software in production, letting others test it first

The Application

• UI can be designed from style guide/brand guidelines
• High percentage of general/abstract code, low amount of project specific code
• Running solid CI from the very first commit: syntax check, CS, static analysis, unit tests, end-to-end tests
• Monitoring backend and frontend and reacting to reports (that is the sole purpose of reports)
• Upgrading all software you depend on once a month (UPGRADE.md)

Users

• Easy onboarding (videos)
• Designing and implementation of a fantastic and engaging UX
• Helping users, not letting them reach a dead end
• Being in very close contact with users (customer relations: marketing, sales, support)

I've received a link from @iamgergo
https://basecamp.com/shapeup/shape-up.pdf

The way a team works has an enormous influence on what it can do.

🗣️ I don't have that amount of money!

• Spend a lot of time on writing down your vision
• Hire a software architect at least for a short time to translate your goals to software: Define the use cases/procedures to reach your vision
• Without the above mentioned leader your team won't be productive, self-management and good decision making is very rare among developers
• Hire at least one backend and one frontend developer

🗣️ I need only 1 developer.

No, you don't.

All Hungarian service providers are blacklisted

I'm curious, why?

In Hungary IT demand is only for low quality services. So providing an acceptable quality service makes the company bankrupt.
Thus all existing companies are blacklisted. 😞