Agile Project Management at AZGiveCamp

Doing an entire project in one weekend is a challenge even for the most experienced of project teams. Fortunately, we have a number of agile principals we can rely on to make sure we deliver value to the non-profit organizations in just these few days. Please keep the following in mind when working on your AZGiveCamp projects:

Get to the Minimum-Viable-Product (MVP) as quickly as possible

Once we’ve got the MVP, we know we have satisfied at least the most basic needs of the NPO. From there, we can start adding features, and delivering even more value.

Deploy early and often

We don’t want to spend all of Sunday finding out that there is a major deployment problem preventing the NPO from using what we built. As soon as we reach an MVP, deploy it, to get those issues out-of-the-way as early as possible. Then, whenever additional significant value is added, deploy again to make sure we always have delivered the maximum value we can. While this is primarily for web-based projects, some deployments are also recommendation for other delivery mechanisms as well.

Keep the features (stories) small

You don’t want to spend a day building one huge feature. Instead, try to keep the features as small as possible and deliver (deploy) them often. Again, the idea is to constantly be delivering value.

 

We recommend the following schedule for projects at AZGiveCamp:

Fri evening:

  • Understand requirements
  • Build the product backlog
  • Define the minimum-viable-product
  • Determine platform and frameworks
  • Setup source control & feature tracking mechanism
  • Begin development

Saturday morning:

  • Deploy the minimum-viable-product

Saturday afternoon – Sunday morning:

  • Continuously deploy features as they are completed
  • Build any needed documentation for each feature as it is completed

Sunday afternoon:

  • Code-Freeze
  • Final Deployment
  • Documentation round-up
  • Turn-over to the NPO