Many of the projects I’ve worked on include multiple aspects of the stack. Working independently or withing a team to take a requirement from concept through to production integration. An example outline of a typical project I’ve worked on daily can be found below:
Concept
This step would usually involve a colleague receiving a brief from a client in regards to what they wish to create/modify with there current system. A colleague would write down all the requirements from there meeting and bring these back for a meeting with myself to run through the feasibility and timescales. Throughout this step, I have the chance to offer alternate suggestions or ideas that I know would work better or provide extensiblity in the future.
Development
This step would now involve the bulk of my time, in which I’d break down the requirement list into my own schedule of tasks. This gives me a personal timeline to follow along with providing structure to how I’ll code the solution physically. Once this timeline is completed I’ll start working through the list, working to the timescale and deadlines that were originally set out in our concept meeting. This may include both front-end UI building, back-end database management and integrations with any third party applications that may required external programs.
Testing – Development
Throughout the development process I will be testing the code myself, ensuring it meets the requirements. Alongside this I’ll have regular catch ups should there be any problems/changes to the scope that I feel may be necessary, or things that we need to confirm with the client themselves. I hold my end product to a high standard and don’t want to provide something to QA that doesn’t work as intended.
Testing – QA
This step would involve creating documentation for my completed work and passing this over to the QA team to review and confirm it meets the specified requirements. Any issues are passed back to me as individual issues with/without reproduction steps. My knowledge of test cases and debugging assists greatly here, as sometimes I’ll need to look into an issue trying multiple steps to identify what a problem may be. This process repeats until QA are happy the project is working as intended.
Testing – Client
As a final testing step we hand the project over to the client for there own “end-user testing” stage in a test system. This allows them to offer feedback against there own in house procedures, alongside any issues they may come across themselves. Any adjustments are fed back through this entire chain, being assigned an additional cost if they are outside the original scope. This is the most important step for me personally, as I want to ensure that the product I’ve made works great for them immediately.
Support
Once all testing steps are complete the project can be rolled out to the clients production (LIVE) system for use within the day to day business. The documentation created would be passed over to the help-desk team and shared around so any issues can be addressed via the entire development team. Clear documentation both internally and externally is therefore crucial to a projects continued success and maintenance.