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Track and report project progress regularly to avoid turning your project plans into mere schedules or calendars
Design and Development
Once the requirements are finalized, the technical lead (in many cases, that role may also be played by you) starts architecting the software and designing the database.
Do have a meeting with the entire team and ensure they understand the bigger picture. More often than not, the developers get stuck in their cocoon and simply start working on the assigned tasks with complete ignorance as to why the application or the software is being built and what it would achieve.
Making them part of these “extraneous” discussions will instill a sense of belonging in them, which will directly translate into enthusiasm and greater involvement. That is when they will start thinking out-of-the-box as well. The end result will be a product that has fewer issues and better quality.
Assign tasks to team members through tools that will help you track the progress of each task, thereby helping you to track the project plan continually. TimeLive is a very effective and flexible tool for the purpose of assigning and tracking task progress.
Ensure that a task is maintained in a single location while updates are being made such that the status moves through logical steps of “Open” (when the task is created), “Assigned” (when it is assigned to someone), “Complete” (when the developer finishes it) to “Closed” (when it is tested to see if it met the requirements). You should aim at having less than 20 status steps, but in rare instances, may have to have more.
You may have any number of these logical steps based on the process you follow but the logical sequence must start at “Open” and must end at “Closed”.
All the messages during this process related to that task should be managed there itself so that a complete picture is obtained in a single location.
Just as requirements, changes and project plans need to be tracked, the developed code should also be tracked. You simply cannot do without version control. You also must have a good understanding of version control and create a policy on how you will manage branches, trunks, etc. to be able to easily revert to various versions.
More often than not, an issue that was resolved rears its ugly head again in the future when something else is fixed. And many a times, the culprit is either the developers using an old copy of the file on their local system or not using the version control system correctly, thereby overwriting the changes made by others.
Subversion (SVN) is an open-source utility gaining in popularity among the available version control tools.
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