WFH Lister

The Tactic Apps team sees this quite often, too many stories and not enough time to complete them all. However, WFH Lister's "Must Have" list consisted of mostly large end-to-end features that put us on a tight release schedule.

Using Agile methodologies, the Tactic Apps team decided to operate on a 2 week iteration schedule as most of the stories were too large to iterate over a single week.

In collaboration with the WFH Lister team, all their stories where sized, prioritized and iterated to fit right into their 6 month deadline. Using this Agile approach, the project was completed on time and within budget.

After the Tactic Apps team iterated through all the "Must Jave" stories, we realized that there would only be 2 weeks remaining to build the frontend and backend for the blog. Unfortunately this was not possible if starting from scratch.

We decided to have a strategy session with the WFH Lister team and came to the conclusion that an pre-built blogging system was the best way forward. Together we chose Wordpress as the backend of choice so the Tactic Apps team only have to build out the frontend.

Making changes during a project is a common request and something that is welcomed by the Tactic Apps team. However, it is often a difficult decision because the change will either cause the removal of another iteration or a change in time, budget or both.

In particular, the WFH Lister team realized they needed an admin panel at launch to manage all their users. This was a problem as it required a full 2 week iteration cycle.

To avoid impacting the current release schedule's time and budget, the Tactic Apps and WFH Lister teams decided to develop the admin panel directly after release. This allowed WFH Lister to launch on time and gather more budget to develop the admin panel with minimal impact.

In web development it can be catastrophic to project deadlines when a key member of the development team is forced to exit a project. Their replacement needs to get up to speed in hours, not days.

At Tactic Apps we pride ourselves on the custom Agile framework we've built. It not only helps our customers stay on time and budget, but also helps our team when these types of problems arise.

Thanks to our end to end, fully tested iterations, our new backend developer was able to plug right in and was up to speed in a couple of hours. This kept the WFH Lister project on track.

A day before release, the WFH Lister team asked us if it was possible to move the deployment from Docker+AWS to Heroku due to potential cost savings within their first year of business.

The Tactic Apps team strategized internally and came to the conclusion that this was possible. Our team worked late into the night and pulled this off just in time for release.