Test as You Go

When working on a really big project, it is very easy to run into trouble with unanticipated issues or for team members to lose sight of the overall goal. To combat this, we take some time during the project planning phase to identify some “mini projects” that we will run along the way.

For example, my team and I developed a Content Management System from the ground up. The time line for the main functionality took us out over two years and there were a countless amount of small details that we had to keep in order.

We identified a small group of our users who offered to help us test things in exchange for becoming the first ones to get to use the system. With our user group in place, we determined the smallest possible amount of these mini projects that would still get us the results we wanted. We had two types of projects, both were focused on generating quick results:

1. Testing individual tools
2. Creating different types of web pages

It is important to note that the projects are not designed to conform to a preconceived notion of “how I think this will work”, but instead to achieving a small part of the final result with a focus on identifying potential problems, giving the team real success they can see along the way and generating excitement among the future users.

We began with the tool testing. One project had six people try out an uploading tool that became the basis for how our users add and edit PDFs and images. Not only we able to customize the interface to what they felt would be the easiest way to use it, we also were able to then set realistic limits for file types and sizes based on actual user need.

Once we had a solid amount of the development done and could start tying pieces together, we began the second type of mini projects in which we asked our users to create different types of web pages. A page of downloadable forms in bulleted-list format or a page with multiple text boxes in which the user changes the template.

That last one brought up the question of what happens to the content of a third text box when the user switches to a template that only uses two text boxes? In hindsight, we should have identified the issue from the beginning, but we managed to save ourselves and catch it here. We were also able to poll our users to find out what would be the most helpful for them.

The management system is now successfully running 98 web applications, all of which continue to do a wider variety of tasks than we originally conceived. Our mini projects allowed us to rapidly test as we developed, gave us real time feedback from actual users and gave us some great success stories along the way to share with upper management. The additional major benefit for me was that it helped to create training documentation along the way, which proved invaluable during the final large roll out.

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