Introduction

This part of the course focus on the following user stories:

As a project manager I want to plan the project so that I can make the best use of my resources.
As a project manager I need to decide what to focus on building right now so that I best satisfy all customers' expectations.
As a project manager I want to track the project so that I can see what the current status is.
As a project manager I want to track the project so that I can forecast whether we will deliver on time or not.
As a software designer I want to document my design in a standardised format so that I can communicate it to other software engineers.

The following concepts are introduced:

Waterfall Development
Iterative Development
Incremental Development
Agile
Scrum
Kanban
Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
GANTT chart
Earned Value Charts
Burn Charts (Also: Burndown charts and burn-up charts)
UML
Unified Processs (Also: Rational Unified Process RUP)

You are done when:

You understand the basics of different development methodologies such as waterfall, iterative development, agile development, scrum, lean.
You are able to break down a problem into different work tasks which, when done, will solve the problem.
You have a brief idea of how to estimate the time and effort needed to solve a work task.
You are able to prioritise your work and create a work plan.
You are able to follow up on your work plan, report your current progress, and predict when you will be done.

Development Methodologies

In this part of the course, we focus on a couple of issues surrounding the development process. First of all, there are a number of choices of which developent process to use, from the intuitively easy to grasp waterfall process to the highly individualised kanban process. Which process type to use depends to some extent on the product you are trying to build, but perhaps more so on which organisation you have. Basically, with stable development teams and fairly stable requirements, you can perhaps do an iterative or incremental project, but the more user interaction, continuously changing requirements, and staff turnover you expect, your organisation will tend to move towards more agile processes. There is also a lot of hype involved here. Companies that do agile are perceived as more modern, hip, and better.

Most processes internally follow a waterfall course of events, with planning, requirements engineering, analysis and design, implementation, testing, deployment, and evaluation. The differences boil down to the amount of work that one iteration takes on, the size of the development teams, and the length of each iteration. Again, in agile there are also a lot of buzzwords added, but that's essentially it. So simple, and yet so powerful. You see, as the scope and timespan for each iteration is reduced (down to weeks or even days), you get quicker feedback loops. You develop much less before you get feedback on what you have done. You also need to be smarter with what you develop so that you can get the /most important/ feedback first.

This is where the concept of a Minimum Viable Product comes in. A minimum viable product, or an MVP, is a product that supports an entire end to end flow. For example, if you are building a hotel booking system, the MVP may be a product that allows you to search and book one single room. Logging in, booking double rooms with extra beds, adding a minibar, room payment, etc. comes later. Searching for and booking a single room means you have some user interface in place, you have a database structure, and you have some architecture with a structure for how to name API endpoints.

There is plenty written about developoment methodologies already. Rather than repeating this in writing, let me explore the concepts in a brief presentation: