Real World Software Development Process

Start -->  Finish

Talking Points

• About me & my company, SST Software.

• What is Scrum? A quick intro.

• What are the team member roles and responsibilities in a software company?

• What are the different development environments and servers?

• What are the steps in the development process?

• Q&A

About Me

• Chuck Han
• 9 yrs of professional experience
• Software/Web developer
• Currently working full time at SST
• @chuck_peter_han
• www.CourageousCoder.com

About SST Software

• World's leading precision agriculture data management company
• We serve the farming industry by providing farmers with decision support tools that help them run their businesses more efficiently and profitably.
• In US alone, we process over 120 million acres of data, about 1/4 of the entire US.
• We offer
  • Ag industry leading platform - agX Platform
  • Desktop app - SST Summit
  • iOS app - Sirrus
  • Various web apps - Account mgmt, data sync, online viewer, agX store, etc. 

What is Scrum?

• Where the word Scrum comes from?
  • Rugby (link)
• Scrum was defined by 2 Japanese professors for a new approach to product development.
• The Scrum process (link).
  • The Scrum process from my own experience.
• Why Scrum?
• Daily Scrum meetings.

Team Roles/Responsibilities

• CEO (Chief Executive Officer)
• CTO (Chief Technology Officer)
• PO (Product Owner)
• BA (Business Analyst)
• UI/UX Designer
• Software Developer (t-shirt link)
• Technical Lead
• DBA (Database Admin)
• Database Developer

Team Roles/Responsibilities Cont'd

• Software Architect
• System Architect
• QA (Quality Assurance)
• IT (Information Technology)
• Marketing
• Sales
• Customer Support
• Contractors

Development Environments & Servers

Environments

• Local
• Dev/QA
• Staging
• Production

Development Environments & Servers

Servers

• Build server
• Source control server
• Web server
• Database server
• Cache server
• Files/documents server
• Email/messaging server
• External/3rd party server

Development Environments & Servers

General comments

• Usually each environment is a complete environment by itself.
• For eg, the local environment in a web dev's machine contains
  • web server - IIS
  • database server - SQL server, Oracle, etc
  • cache server - Couchbase server
  • build - Visual Studio MS Build
  • source control - TFS client (VS), Git client

Steps In The Development Process

Steps In The Development Process

Steps In The Development Process

• Gather and analyze requirements
• Document requirements
• Create UI mockups and prototypes
• Create PBIs (and bugs if existing software)
• Have project planning meeting with developers.
• Create high level software architecture. (link)
• Create low level detailed code design.
• Write tasks and estimate hours for each PBI and bug.
• Have sprint kick-off meeting.

Steps In The Development Process (Cont'd)

• Software construction.
• Daily scrum meetings.
• Write unit tests.
• Do peer code reviews.
• Deploy to Dev/QA environment for QA.
• QA will test in Dev/QA environment.
• Fix bugs.
• Demo software internally.
• Deploy to staging environment for final QA.

Steps In The Development Process (Cont'd)

• QA will test again in staging environment.
• Fix bugs.
• Have pre-deployment meeting before deploying to production.
• Deploy to production & test.
• Rollback to previous state if deployment goes bad.
• Sprint retrospect meeting.
• Demo to key users and stakeholders.
• Continue to engage our users for feature requests and bugs.
• Plan for next sprint.

Steps In The Development Process (Cont'd)

The result of a good process lived out:

SST is a well-oiled machine when it comes to cranking out software.

This is NOT the norm!

Q & A