The 7 (or so) habits of highly successful projects

Each time we offer at UC Berkeley based on the Engineering Software as a Service curriculum, students complete a substantial open-ended course project in teams of 4 to 6.  Each team works with a nonprofit or campus business unit to solve a specific business problem using SaaS; the student organization Blueprint helps us recruit customers.

Besides creating screencasts demonstrating their projects, students also participate in a poster session in which we (instructors) ask them to reflect on the experience of doing the project and how the techniques taught in the class helped (or didn't help) their success.

Virtually all project teams praised BDD and Cucumber as a way of driving the development of the app and reaching agreement with the customer, and all agreed on the importance of the proper use of version control. Beyond that, there was more variation in which techniques different teams used (or wished in retrospect that they had used). Below is the most frequently-heard advice our students would give to future students doing similar projects, in approximate order of popularity (that is, items earliest in the list were independently reported by the largest number of project teams).

1. Reuse, don't reinvent. Before coding something that is likely to be a feature used by other SaaS apps (file upload, capability management, and so on), take the time to search for Ruby gems or JavaScript libraries you can use or adapt. Even two hours of searching is less time than it takes to design, code and test it yourself.


2. Start from a good object-oriented design and schema. Taking time to think about the key entity types (models), relationships among them, and how to capture those relationships in a schema using associations and foreign keys. A good design reduces the likelihood of a painful refactoring due to a schema change.


3. Weekly meetings are not enough.  Especially with the larger 6-person teams we used in the Fall 2013 course offering (237 students forming 40 teams), a 15-minute daily standup meeting helped tremendously in keeping everyone on track, preventing conflicting or redundant work, and informally sharing knowledge among team members who ran into problems. Teams that met only once a week and supplemented it with online chat or social-networking groups wished they had met more often.


4. Commit to TDD early.  Teams that relied heavily on TDD found its greatest value in regression testing: regression bugs were spotted immediately and could be fixed quickly. Teams that didn't commit to TDD had problems with regression when adding features or refactoring. Teams that used TDD also noted that it helped them organize not only their code, but their thoughts on how it would be used ("the code you wish you had").


5. Use a branch per feature. Fine-grained commits and branch-per-feature were essential in preventing conflicts and keeping the master branch clean and deployment-ready.


6. Avoid silly mistakes by programming in pairs.  Not everyone paired, but those who did found that it led to higher quality code and avoided silly mistakes that might have taken extra time to debug otherwise.


7. Divide work by stories, not by layers.  Teams in which one or a pair of developers owned a story had far fewer coordination problems and merge conflicts than teams that stratified by layer (front-end developer, back-end developer, JavaScript specialist, and so on) and also found that all team members understood the overall app structure better and were therefore more confident when making changes or adding features.

There you have it—the seven habits of highly successful projects, distilled from student self-reflections from approximately sixty projects over two offerings of the course.  We hope you find them helpful!