13 survival rules in the process of turning an application into a product

A recent TechRepublic developer survey shows that more than 55 percent of the developers involved in the survey believe that if a program reaches the budget, it is successful in terms of release and business needs. However, there is still a muddy road from development to user acceptance of the software.

From converting an application into a product to ensuring that the user has been properly trained and fully understood, the implementation process of this program is no doubt difficult. It is also very common that there is always a lot of pressure and sleepless nights in this process. The following are some tips for managing the delivery process of your application.

#1: Check the hardware. Make sure that appropriate hardware devices are available and correctly configured. Make sure you are familiar with other programs that use the same resource, including servers and connections, and understand how these programs occupy hardware resources.

#2: Make sure the server is the same-or as much as possible. Establish development, quality assurance (QA), and production environments in a familiar way. Remember all the differences, even if they seem unimportant. You may be stuck in the implementation process due to a small configuration problem that another person is angry with. This is not fun.

#3: Be kind to management personnel. Provide them with correct documents and training. They are critical to software delivery, and are generally the most knowledgeable people in the user group. They can provide you with information that you may not be able to obtain in other ways.

#4: Develop a secure installation program. No matter whether your application is a substitute for the current system or an upgrade package, you must carefully construct a reverse installation plan to ensure that users do not stop their key business applications. Nothing can shock management more than a group of employees who have nothing to do. This kind of loss will lead to user dissatisfaction with you, no matter how smooth your program works after the correct installation.

#5: compile a complete document. I often stress this because I have good reasons. The complete system documentation helps the program maintenance department maintain the program over the lifetime of the program. With a good design style and intuitive help documentation and user guide, users can understand the application, making it more likely for users to accept the program.

#6: check data. Ensure that the data is properly organized to comply with the project specifications. You should also ensure that there is a good process to dump data from one environment to another. If you have to finish the job at night or weekend, you need to pay attention to the schedule issues that may arise.

#7: QA implementation process. In addition to enabling the application's functionality to pass quality assurance (QA), you should also ensure that the software delivery process passes a careful check. The first environment for running your program may be the QA environment. In this environment, there is a series of work to complete, including the configuration and initialization of the database and the configuration and initialization of the installation process. The normal configuration process will become a key factor in determining whether the software is successfully released.

#8: Set up metadata. A good metadata repository is vital to users who want to generate reports from the data stored in your program. Database documents should describe the forms and data fields in the database, which can help users generate useful reports. Good metadata also helps you identify potential data problems. I believe that any application (and its database) will have more or less problems. Good metadata can help you or database developers find a quick solution to the problem.

#9: implement excellent version control processes. Make sure that you have a good version control process and that feedback and error reports are included in the version control system.

#10: create a good user contact point. Provide users with a reliable way to talk about their concerns. Appoint a person, whether a subject matter expert in a business unit or a technical group member, for example, a project manager or system administrator, as the contact person of the user to ensure that the user has confidence in the normal operation of the program. This contact person should provide you with accurate feedback and be sure to keep in touch with the user before solving the problem. This can also avoid frequent interruptions to developers.

#11: actively collect feedback. Provides an automatic and easy-to-use method to input feedback, improvement requirements, and error reports.

#12: make an estimate. Predict your program's strengths and weaknesses as much as possible. Write them down and make plans for modification and enhancement. Then compare the information with the user feedback to find out how to better design the next time.

#13: relax yourself. Do Something unrelated to the project. Swim for hundreds of laps. After completing the software design, you can travel on weekends as a reward to complete the task on time. Modify your resume (you should always do this ). In the critical connection point of application survival, you should do something to keep your nerves relaxed.

Estimation of unpredictable events
Finally, it is important to remember that it takes some time to transform an application into a product. The user interface may need to be changed here or the database must be repaired there.

When creating a new program, dealing with unknown and unexpected things is the most frustrating thing. Everything you can do is to plan everything and pray for good luck.

Once your application has been successfully put into operation and the development process leaves room for maintenance, the management's expectations for this project will change. In a later article,

We will discuss what will happen when your project is mature.

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