I hope this article finds you well! I've compiled this checklist for the benefit of anyone reading this, be they an engineer or manager, experienced or junior, starting on a new project or trying to tweak an existing one for better results. Starting a new software project can be both exciting and overwhelming. Whether you are an experienced developer or a newcomer to the world of software development, having a well-defined checklist can significantly improve the chances of success for the project and your time with it.

1. Identify the Product Owner

This is the most important box to check. Your PO determines the success or failure of the project. This person is responsible for understanding the problem, visualizing the solution, and translating it into requirements that can be feasibly implemented by the team and their technology and capacity. The biggest painpoints all orbit around this individual, such as "timelines," "estimates", "scope", and goals, and for anyone with a decent amount of experience in the game knows these lyrics show up in every chorus.

If you have a rockstar PO who's killing it, then great! Your project is on a great start! For those projects where this isn't the case, I'd offer the following points:

• Official Scrum guides specify that the PO should be a single person, and with good cause. If your project is going to deviate from this decision, there should be a well-understood reason as to why.

• There is probably no such person who completely will understand both the business side and the technical side of a project. For that reason, it should be understood that the PO will ineviatbly have to delegate some responsibility to appropriate collaborators, and that's okay. With that said, it should go without saying that the team should do everything to support the PO and help them achieve their goal, including regular communication and advisement.

2. Knowledge is flowing

Everyone should feel like they have all the nessessary information to be successful. This should all be very transparent and accessable. Good signs are tickets that have great descriptions, and more importantly layout steps that can be followed in order to test that the work is complete, and that the scope is well defined. If it seems that the work is not clear for the contributors that are doing the work, then consider the following tips:

• Ask for people to ask questions and get feedback. Ensure that everyone feels comfortable asking for help.

• Meetings are the primary way to communicate, but try to steer away from meetings that are too long or too frequent. I always find better results creating shorter meetings, with only the nesssarry participants, and whenever possible I like to brand them more as 'workshops' than meetings.

• Really focus, as a team, on creating good tickets. Working from a perspective of what should it do, to how to test it, and then finally how to implement it will be key. Test Driven Development!

3. The developer loop

The developer loop should be as quick as possible. This means that the time between making a change and seeing the results of that change should be as short as possible. This is a key factor in developer happiness, and it's also a key factor in the quality of the code. It's not feasable to meet work commitments if the developer loop is too long. If it takes too long to see the results of a change, loop into better tooling that allows more immediate feedback, such as hot reloading, or embrace a test driven development approach where business requirements can be declared and confirmed using a test harness that should in most circumstances provide faster feedback than normal approaches.

4. Following good SDLC practices and doing them correctly

It should go without saying, but following good SDLC practices is key to success. This means that the team should be following a well defined process that is understood by all. This process should be well documented, and should be followed by all. If there are any deviations from the process, they should be well understood and documented. It's very easy to skip things that don't seem to matter, like retrospectives, especially when project hardships are being felt. However, following processes matter the most when things become difficult. If it feels like SDLC processes are being skipped, then have conversations about why with your colleagues, and you may find that you may not be alone in your feelings, which can be empowering to bring the team back torwards success

5. The Backlog is in good shape

While it ultimately falls on the Product Owner to manage the backlog, it should be in everyone's interest to ensure that the backlog is in good shape. Consider the following tips to ensure this:

• Is there a regular cadence where teammates review and refine the items?

• Does the system in place fit the team and the project? Perhaps creating more structure around tickets could help foster a better approach to creating tickets, such as designating custom fields that allow ticket creators to define steps to test, scope, and other important information.

• Does everyone have a similar understanding of the relationships between tickets? It can and should vary by team and project, but within a team, there should be a common understanding of how tickets and their heiherarchies are organized.

6. Foster the culture of testability and observability

Testing and observability should be at the forefront when planning new project challenges. This means that the team should be thinking about how to test and observe the work that they are doing. As alluded to earlier, encouragement and guard rails, such as ticket templates that ask for such information, can help foster this culture. When planning for a project, consider allowing the testers and quality assurance team to take an active, rather than reactive, role to the design and implementation of the solution.

7. Position for success, never failure

Ultimately, everyone on a team should feel like they are in a position to be successful. Success should be the default. If delays and failures are the norm, then the team will have to make significant (and ideally blameless) changes to the project approach. Consider the following tips to ensure that the team is positioned for success:

• No existing process or tooling should be considered sacred. If something isn't working, then it should be changed.

• Is the work too difficult or structured in a way that makes it difficult to complete? Consider breaking the work down into smaller chunks, or reorganizing the work into a different structure.

• Are contributors empowered to reach out, and communicate, and collaborate? Often times, the challenges of a project are not nessesserily hard, but that people don't have what they need to succeed, and they will need to get it from someone else who has what they need.

Conclusion

By following this comprehensive checklist, you can lay a strong foundation for your new project and increase the chances of its success. Remember that flexibility and adaptability are crucial in the dynamic world of software development, so be prepared to iterate and refine your approach as the project progresses. Good luck with your project!