1> The right leadership.
Any project must have its technical leadership and its business leadership straight. Yes, this boils down to two people who will challenge each other and maintain the necessary checks and balances.
2> Management & Escalation.
One of the biggest blunders and chaotic environments is where you have non-technical management managing technical work. Recipe for disaster as you will spend you life on escalations that look complex and scary, however, are very simply solved. Also, a lack of understanding of the development cycle usually leads to pre-mature questions from the management which in turn leads to pre-mature decision making, needless work etc. Eg. on one of my projects, being the architect / technical lead, I was asked (by the VP) for a technical specification of the system within the first month of what was a 2 yr project !! Understand that managers want to know when things will get done even before they allow anything to start. Developers will not reliably tell you when things will get done until they are actually done. Such is life and the variability of agile. You are welcome to use waterfall if you want a 100% schedule predictability, however, understand, that you are basically getting 1 unit of work at a cost of 5 (the addl. 4 are padding to manage the risks/unknowns which are inherent in most projects). On structure, you have basically two philosophies, architect/tech lead report to the manager or manager report to the architech / tech lead. I vote for the latter. As long as the manager / project manager understand their role wrt the tech lead / architect, things typically are fine. Watch for this dynamic very very carefully as this is where bad bad decisions are usually made. You do NOT want a non-technical person making a technical decision.
3> Top talent recruiting - the best attract the best. No one likes carrying dead weight. Once you seed the team correctly, this will be self-correcting. I have and never will believe in the 200+ project team size. I have done amazing things with a 40 person development team. Remember, the software design and tools you choose itself brings limitations on how many developers can work concurrently and productively.
4> Pay attention to the learning curve. Things will not progress at the pace you would expect until you have a seed development team that has matured sufficiently around their understanding of the business problem. These will become your technical leads as your project grows. It is wise to invest this learning in the best technical developers from the start as they are the ones who are going to produce the software.
5> Match your technology choices to your developer team skills. If you want your project to be the guinea pig for the 'next cool new tool / technology' .. OK .. but understand your risks. You need the time to get your developers up to speed on this.
6> Establish the right roles within the team from the start.
Architect/Designer, Developer/Tech Lead, Business SME/Tester, Project Manager, Test/Development Environment Manager, Application support lead, Deployment Lead, Integration Lead (Designer), Business Implementation Lead (Training/Comms/Metrics)
7> Get and stay close to the end-user/customer.
The shorter the communication chain between an end user and a developer, the greater the chance of success.
8> Test from the start - your user stories are really test cases in disguise. Pay attention to test data. Test Director is a decent tool to document your tests and track your coverage.
9> Solve the hard problems first. Focus on the unknowns as early as possible. PANIC EARLY !!
Its only great teams that have a 40 hr work week in their final week before deployment. No magic here .. it comes from spending the weekends before that so that you are coasting in style when you near the finish line.
10> Develop/Test with real data as early as possible.
At the early phases of a project, the developers must have flexibility over the testers. This is the best-effort co-operative testing phase. It is extremely frustrating for the testers as the productivity is low. If you are using end-users, you must have alignment, else, you will be fire-drilling all the time trying to manage perceptions of problems from above. This phase of testing is key as your end goal is to get as much early feedback to the developers. During the last phase of the project, the testers must be the enemy of the developers as they move to the 'antagonistic' testing and the user acceptance testing phase. Here, the testers must be the focus with full support from the developers and the test environment leads. Another best practice is to have a repeatable set of test cases rather than a set of testers. This provides a very easy way to manage stakeholders as anybody who wants a say, can review and add to the test cases. The better they are, the better your chances for a quality delivery.
11> Co-locate as much as possible.
NB> Do not assume co-location means same building or floor. Even team members strewn across the floor randomly will not have the same effectiveness as an integration pod or 6 adjascent cubicles housing a sub-team working on a common area. There is truly an amazing effect on productivity. Make the hard call and force this if you are getting into the red zone. I understand the day and age of offshoring, however, in crunch mode, you cannot replace good old co-location with anything. Remember, communication/organizational barriers is the most common problem to integration problems. The main problems will be at the boundaries.
12> Basic software engineering disciplines - makefiles, daily/continuous builds, regression test automation, code reviews, use of software quality and analysis tools (purify, jprobe, ..).
13> If you are using 3rd party tools, understand your risks. There will be issues and it is up to you to design around them. Remember, you will have limited flexibility to fix/modify the 3rd party tool. A third party tool does not relieve you from the need to understand the details.
14> Certain roles go hand in hand with accountabilities and later roles in the project lifecycle eg. it is ideal to have the people who specified the user requirements also be the testers; the solution designers/architects be also intrinsic in the integration / testing / defect resolution of the project.
15> Plan for production - clean up the logfiles - meaningful and concise. Write the required business process monitoring reports that allow you to ensure the platform's effectiveness post production. Do this early as this will allow you to identify gaps in the design / functionality that can make your life extremely difficult post production. A easy example is for a workflow based system, have the ability to take a snapshot of the in-flight jobs and where they are. Have a clear model of expected execution profile so you can catch exceptions, performance issues, bottlenecks, etc.
16> Measure before you implement, measure after you implement .. you are not done until you restabilize the business KPIs (and this will take you a month). Your end-users may not notice things as they are new to the system too .. so, don't expect to get the usual level of guidance from operation on 'problem areas / defects'.
