Starting a Tech Business: A Practical Guide for Anyone Creating or Designing Applications or Software

The Reality

This section describes the outcome the Enable Quiz's iterations.

Iteration 1/Early Demo

Enable Quiz gets through this first iteration with minimal cuts and bruises. The only person who hasn't finished is Mike, something that he finds satisfying as a manager but frustrating as an individual contributor. Fortunately, his day job is manager. Keeping the teams rolling has taken more time than he thought, and Marek is still coming up to speed, though he's doing well now.

Mike thinks they can make up the time on Iteration 2. Since everyone else has finished on time, Mike has given them a day off and he's going to use the breathing room to complete the lion's share of his remaining work and hand it over to Marek for final testing, cleaning, and documentation.

They are on time, on budget. On QA, Raul organized the test plan framework well and he's working well with the development teams. They'll have automated regression running early in the next iteration, and Raul has the developers set up with a simple process for them to fix their bugs.

The thing that worries Mike most is the back office, particularly CRM and billing since these are new to him. In the worst of worlds, he can stay up all night and fix anything that needs to get done on Salesforce.com. However, he's unsure about billing. As far as the rest of the program is concerned, this is where everything stands:

• The front-end team at Snoetrope is solid.
• Marek will do fine on the quiz application.
• QA is better than expected. ...