We are a small team that is about to start developing a localized version of a successful US web app in Korea, using RoR.
Our question is: What process would you recommend we use to go about developing the app?
Should we start with the data models? The views in HTML and then code them? Take a single feature, develop it and then add additional features as necessary?
A few more details about the project:
- it is a web app for small business owners
- it includes the usual crm-reporting-dashboard-user admin-document mgmtfeatures that most small biz apps tend to have
- team size is initially 2 people: a programmer and a designer/CSS guru (just one coder)
- experience level is medium. good knowledge of Git, Ruby, Rails and XHTML/CSS, less experienced with deployment issues. this is the first project of its kind that we are doing together as a team
Best Answer
I'd recommend the behaviour driven development pattern,
If your not familiar let me give you an overview:
Start at the nuts and bolts the "elevator pitch" of the application..
"What is this thing we're building? What value does it bring?"
And then pick the absolute minimum requirement "feature" and start "specing" it out.. id' recommend using Cucumber: http://cukes.info/ and Rspec: http://rspec.info/ to describe the feature how it must behave.. run the tests/specs and watch them fail..
Then dive in and start implementing the feature and watch the tests pass 1 by 1..
When this feature is done (all the tests pass) repeat the process.. move onto the next minumum requirement "feature" and so on..
As for the workload focus on the feature your building together, the programmer works on the behaviour and the designer works on the look and feel until both work perfectly together..