How do you plan your development projects?

Quote from: dibacu at Jan 25, 2009, 04:45 PM

You can download XMind from Sourceforge.

Thanks, that worked.

Terry , Thanks for sharing, very well differed and sliced notes!

A lot of great ideas in here. I’ll add a couple thoughts:

1. I avoid mockups in Photoshop... some shops live by them, but I find that they take so long to create and transport, and they can take a loooong time to implement. I find it’s much faster to get working HTML mockups right off the bat (as soon as I sketch it out on paper and people have agreed to features).

2. I’ve tried Mantis as a project management software... really simple program with an unfortunate User Interface, but it does offer tracking capability for a small team. Bluehost has an automatic installer for its packages.

Process! Something I could unfortunately talk about for waaaay too long. I’ve give a general overview, but detail the development specifics. Disclosure: I’m a User Experience Architect, not a developer (anymore)!

• Discovery
• Competitive Analysis
• User Research
• Information Architecture
• Design/prototyping
• Usability Testing
• Development
  [list]
  [li]XHTML planning (with all of the above steps, especially IA - which involves content modeling - this step does not take too terribly long)
• XHTML writing
• Image production
• CSS first pass (colors), and A-grade browser QA
• CSS second pass (typography), and A-grade browser QA
• CSS third pass (layout/positioning), and A-grade browser QA
  [list]
  [li]Doing browser QA after each step saves a lot of time in the long run as you can spot errors sooner, rather than doing everything and THEN firing up IE6
• I normally do my SVN commits after each CSS pass

[/list]

• JavaScript/dynamic behaviors
• CMS Integration

[/li]
[/list]

As a UX guy, I don’t always get into the development portion of the project, and instead spend all my time in the items listed prior to development. But I still like to play front-end developer every once in a while!

Thanks for sharing Mark ... advice on IE6 checks at each pass is sage.