For this assignment, you need to develop an initial draft of project documentation based on the principles of the Agile Manifesto - MUST READ and Lean - READ ALL THE PARTS 1-7 THAT ARE LINKED ON THE LEFT. The purpose of this assignment is to help you develop the mindset required take an idea and turn it into a product that people value. This is an open ended assignment meaning that you need to think and create and not just follow a set of instructions. You are the one creating instructions for yourself and the development team that you will be part of and/or possibly leading in the future. For this assignment, you should use ChatGPT as much as possible to help you write good documentation. It is very good at taking what you mean to say and turning into this type of documentation.
In the spirit of Lean and to start our project off using the "pull" approach to develompent we will only focus on the following goal. MyWebClass is a website and we will need a development team that needs to work together in parallel meaning that we eventually need to produce various content to support the objectives of the site. In order for this to happen we need to create a basic web template that can be found using a search engine, addresses any legal requirements that are relevant to our project, allows us to legally use Google Analytics to measure user behaviour on the site, and passes w3c validation, Lighthouse, GDPR Scanner.
In addition to planning the initial 0.1.0 release of the website template we also need a plan setup a DevOps process that support the development of the project.
In general, you can expect that you have 3 major parts to your plan at this stage:
- Basic Project Documentation and Project Management
- DevOps
- MyWebClass.org base website template with all technical and legal requirements satisfied to use Google Analytics and be appropriately listed in a search engine by implementing the basic on page SEO requirements.
To assist you with this project, I've included ALL of the code for required for a web page in the src/index.html file and included comments as to why that line is in there, so that you can write a user story and eventually a test for it.
- Lean and Agile are both ideas that are complementary; however, neither is prescriptive in their implementation. Your project plan should be inspired by these ideas; however, how you implement them should be tailored to fit the particular project. Remember Lean's core idea is build, measure, and learn to create continuous improvement. Agile is essentially a way to organize within a software development team to make the development process sustainable and effective at producing working software with the least amount of waste.
- In order to facilitate communication and provide a structure for project planning you must organize your project into
themes, initiative, epics, user stories, and tasks, which are terms used within agile.
Themes:
- Themes are high-level categories of work that align with an organization's strategic objectives. They help to define and communicate the focus areas for a project or product. Themes can be used to organize and prioritize work, guide decision-making, and ensure that efforts are aligned with business goals. Initiatives:
- Initiatives are a collection of related projects and activities that are aligned with a common goal or objective. They help to break down larger goals into smaller, manageable pieces. Initiatives are usually larger in scope than epics and are typically managed by a program or portfolio management team. Epics:
- Epics are large pieces of work that can be broken down into smaller, more manageable pieces (i.e., user stories). They are larger in scope than user stories and often require coordination across multiple teams. Epics typically represent a major business or technical challenge that needs to be addressed. User Stories:
- User stories are short, simple descriptions of a feature or piece of functionality from the perspective of a user or customer. They are used to communicate requirements and prioritize work. User stories are typically small in scope and can be completed in a single sprint (i.e., a short, time-boxed period of work). They help to ensure that development efforts are focused on delivering value to the end user. Tasks:
- Agile Tasks:
- Tasks are the smallest units of work in Agile development. They are specific, actionable items that need to be completed in order to deliver a user story. Tasks are usually estimated in hours and are used to track progress and identify obstacles. They are typically managed by individual team members and are part of the team's daily work.
- Our goal is to develop a "pull" process for the development of the MyWebClass product and minimize or eliminate the amount of "push" in the MyWebClass.org project. Read this about the difference between push and pull to understand how these concepts relate to product development.
- Every theme, initiative, epic, user story, and task needs a way to test that it is working. You can specify automated testing i.e. pytest for unit testing, Playwright for end to end testing, or manual testing. You may need to combine both manual and automated testing for themes, epics, and initiatives; however, tasks and user stories should us some type of automated testing as much as possible.
- Every theme, initiative, epic, user story, and task should identify how you will measure it's effectiveness quantitatively. If you can't think of one now just put something in that might work in the future and this can be improved as things become more clear. YOu need to consider that to implement lean you have to build it, MEASURE IT, and LEARN, its not necessary or expected for something to be perfect, it is expected that any resources invested in something have some methodology to evaluate performance, and provide feedback for continuous improvement.
For this assignment you will need to find a partner to review your project documentation and you will need to review their documentation. Compare both of your project plans and create a list of the changes you decide to implement and file them as issues on your repository. Resolve the issues using branches and merge the branch into main, so that you have the best version of your project plan that combines the best ideas of you and your partner. Do not do the first draft of the plan together, design it yourself and you should review your partners plan, and they should review yours. Practice using the GitHub comment and review tool to review the agile tasks. Watch this video on how to do a code review using GitHUb
- 25 Points for having at least 5 comments on your code by your partner that result in 5 issues being created and resolved.
- 50 Points effective and sensible organization of your project that applies Agile and Lean ideas. Use ChatGPT to help you with the writing, so that its written with a professional business tone and vocabulary.
- 25 Points for demonstrating that you understand that each activity needs to be measured and that each task needs some combination of manual and automated testing.
Once you have the best version of your project plan after comparing it and resoling the issues turn the plan into Canvas.
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Here is an example of how I initially break down a project; however, I intend to change this in the near future, so that i organize my themes by business activity instead of release schedule. Examples of these themes include the DevOps and Search Engine Themes.
In practice, it is commonplace to adapt project documentation to meet evolving project needs early on in the process. Therefore, please do not feel obligated to follow my approach. Instead, view it as an example of how to develop your own documentation, based on your preferred methodology for breaking down the problem. Should you find that it does not meet your needs, it can be adjusted, given that we are still in the early stages of the project.
At this juncture, the efficacy of the documentation is measured by how well it enables us to manage the project. We will review this effectiveness before the next iteration of the project.
| Release Version | Release Date | Features |
|---|---|---|
| 0.1.x | TBD | TBD |