Design – Build – Run: Applied Practices and Principles for Production-Ready Software Development

3.1. Preparation Is Paramount

Chapter 1 discussed the high-level activities involved in software development and implementation. You also looked at the production-readiness process and saw that your applications, environments, processes, and tools must be fit for purpose and your users must be trained and ready. All of these are brought together and shown in Figure 3-1

Figure 3.1. Figure 3-1

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. So is learning from our triumphs and mistakes. When planning your project, you need to remember your past experiences and look at what was good and what wasn't so good. You need to improve everything each time until you have the ideal process. Although the process will differ from project to project and organization to organization, the best time to reflect on past experience is early on. Once your project is off and running, the time to change and the impact of change generally increases, although you should reflect at very regular intervals and improve where necessary.

You want to give your projects the best chance of success and a good way of achieving this is to ensure that you are prepared for each of the activities in Figure 3-1. You need to think about what you're going to do and how you're going to do it. This can be thought of as mobilization. Before starting actual development, you should mobilize the development activities — for example, ensuring ...