While you’re working on your software project, there’s, unfortunately, no guarantee that it won’t go over your budget limits, ruin the deadlines, or fail to meet expectations. Even if you can’t have a magic pill to avoid these, you can conduct health checks to ensure the development goes as planned. To help you with that, we held a webinar that sheds light on how to take care of a software product and align it with initial goals. Our expert, who has years of background in the relevant field, shares lots of practical knowledge for effective tech product delivery. What do we talk about in particular? - Industry practices to track project progress - Dynamical adjustments of functionality - Aligning customizations with the roadmap - Automated testing as part of a health check - Dashboards for effective communication - Technical debt and its role in your project You can find all this in our on-demand webinar: https://www.velvetech.com/events/software-project-health-check/

1. Software Project Health Check:
Best Practices and Techniques
for Your Product
Prepared by Artemiy Firsov

2.  MANAGING EXPECTATIONS VS. REALITY
 DYNAMIC PRIORITIZATION OF FEATURES
 KNOW CLIENT’S PROBLEMS BEFORE THEY KNOW IT
 TECHNICAL MEASURES FOR A HEALTHY PRODUCT
 USE DATA FOR DECISION-MAKING
 TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT
 INTEGRATION AND CUSTOMIZATION OPENNESS
 Q&A
Today’s Agenda

3. Managing
Expectations vs.
Reality

4. CLEAR USE CASES AND SOW
MILESTONES WITH ETAs
KNOW WHO WORKS FOR YOU 
Managing Expectations vs. Reality
1
2
3
BUDGET
4

5.  Define budget
 Define objectives
 Define acceptance testing cases
 Set ground truth for every stakeholder
 Do that for each initiative in your product
Managing Expectations vs. Reality
1. CLEAR USE CASES AND SOW

6.  In software development, usually hours = $
 Keep in mind deployment, acceptance
testing, contingency, documentation, auto-
testing, etc.
 Track your operating costs like subscriptions,
cloud hosting, provider fees, etc.
Managing Expectations vs. Reality
2. BUDGET

7.  Allow for planning a budget burn rate
 Set expectations for everybody, but more
importantly for the team
 Increase motivation
Managing Expectations vs. Reality
3. MILESTONES WITH ETAs

8.  WHO works on WHAT project for how much
FTU during what PERIOD
 Define teams
 Personal approach – aligning employee
expectations with the reality of the product
Managing Expectations vs. Reality
4. KNOW WHO WORKS FOR YOU 

9.  Great mockup and scoping tool
 Automation, formulas, timeline tracking,
more flexible than JIRA and requires less onboarding
 Issue tracking system for tasks and epics as well as
initiatives tracking with timelines
 Great tool for tracking data that does not fit anywhere
else, allows quick prototyping of metrics
 Allows granular tracking of different project variables
but requires deep knowledge of how to use it
Some Tools That Help With That

10. Dynamic
Prioritization of
Features

11. ONGOING MARKET REVIEW
 What is offered?
 How is it offer?
 How that corresponds with
global trends?
LISTEN TO EXISTING CLIENTS
 Offer feature requests along
with support
 Develop a protocol to prioritize
client requested features,
keeping them in the loop
 Offer paid customizations based
on urgency
EMBRACE THE TEAM
 Perform brainstorming session
 Allow every member of the
team to define the product
Dynamic Prioritization of Features
Spend some time for R in R&D to answer these questions – how new technologies can be used/enhanced in our product?

12. • Defines specific milestones
planned using available
resources, SoW, budget
• Can be planned by month /
quarter / year
• Allows aligning the team
on the upcoming plans and
ease the next initiative
scoping
• Prioritizing based on client
needs, product plans, and
criticality
• Defines strategic plans for
several years ahead
• Increases motivation and
shapes both backlog and
roadmap
ROADMAP PRIORITIZED BACKLOG VISION
Dynamic Prioritization of Features

13.  All of these tools are useful here, too
 Structured documentation
Some Tools That Help With That

14. Know Client’s
Problems Before
They Know It

15. LOG SYSTEM ARTIFACTS
 Backend logging
 Frontend logging
 Promote logging to the team
 Teach BAs and Support to read technical logs
Know Client’s Problems Before They Know It
 How your servers are doing
 How your software and tools are doing
 How your endpoints are doing
 How your clients are doing
MONITORING

16.  Ability to reproduce, record, and receive
technical data from user's browser
 Monitoring tools
Some Tools That Help With That

17. Technical Measures
for a Healthy Product

18. Technical Measures for a Healthy Product
 Use automated deployment
 Store your infrastructure as code
CI/CD
 Track the debt
 Use online code checkers to find issues early
 Plan for it on your roadmap
TECHNICAL DEBT
 Document and support your test cases
 Automate your test cases
 Build out testing protocols for different events
QUALITY ASSURANCE

19.  Automate tests
 Tests documentation and support
 Code repository and CI/CD
 Code checkers
Some Tools That Help With That

20. Use Data for
Decision-Making

21. Each project is unique. Yet, here are some examples
of how you can leverage data.
 Set actionable goals based on data:
• We need X users to cover Y costs
• The feature should be delivered by M to win
client N
• We need to add K FTUs to the team L from the
team O to deliver the project P by T
 Track task types to understand commodity tasks
SoW
 Build regular reports with work type / initiative
time spent breakdown to adjust the vector of
the workforce
 Build instruments for your employees to track
their time and effort
Use Data for Decision-Making

22. Use Data for Decision-Making
 Jira projects store product module related tasks
 Epics within projects – initiatives and features
 Components are used to group support and
operational tickets
 Such approach allows you to get the stats per
module per initiative weekly, track support
efforts, etc., and adjust accordingly depending
on the situation
REAL-LIFE EXAMPLE

23. Training and
Development

24.  Encourage initiative and responsibility
 Allocate working hours for education, learning by
doing
 Make sure each member of the team knows
business and tech domain basics
 Encourage sharing and preserving knowledge
 Learn lessons based on the practice
 Elaborate on the protocols for engagement with
external teams
Training and Development

25. Training and Development
 Move DM communication to group chats, and
better to emails, and better to ticketing
platform, and better to the knowledge base
 Ask team to write detailed worklogs in KB if the
work is not reported anywhere else
 Allow developers to participate in business
analysis and prototyping
 Create onboarding materials and online guides
for both clients and team members
 Run retrospective meetings and demos
REAL-LIFE EXAMPLES

26. Integration and
Customization
Openness

27.  Open APIs
• Allow others to build upon your
technology
 Offer paid customizations
• Allow receiving additional
investments as well as extend the
feature set of the product
 Adopt Low-Code
• Ease the customizations and
integrations by implementing low-code
capabilities
 Build up community, bring new ideas, and
invite customers
Integration and Customization Openness

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29. Thank You!
+1 (847) 559-0864
sales@velvetech.com
www.velvetech.com