Large Drupal Projects:Blessing or Burden?

Twin Cities Drupal CampJuly 19, 2013

VP of Client Services

Email: nlind@phase2technology.com

Nicole Lind

Twitter: @nicole_lind

So!ware Architect

Email: tcosgrove@phase2technology.com

Tim Cosgrove

Twitter: @timcosgrove

What is a Large Drupal Project?• Number of project hours exceeds 2000• Complexity of the requirements dictates a custom Drupal

solution• Build requires specialized team members (Project

Manager, Business Analyst, Developer, Architect, etc.)

Planning

Poorly Understood Requirements

• Solution

• Discovery

• Clear Project Methodology

Underestimating Real Effort

• Solution

• Discovery

• Clear Project Methodology

• Risk Assessment and Mitigation Plans

Data Mapping and Migration Issues

• Solution

• Discovery

• Migration Documentation

Unaccounted for Onboarding Time

• Solution

• Discovery

• Clear Project Methodology

Client Relationships

Editorial and/or Production Team Apathy and Insanity

• Solution

• Demos and Training

• Migration Documentation

• Annotated Wireframes for Everything Including Admin Screens

• Plan for Long Term Maintenance of Solution

Ignoring the Importance of the Administrative Interfaces

• Solution

• Annotated Wireframes for Everything Including Admin Screens

• Demos and Training

People

Inexperienced Architects Designing a Custom Drupal Solution

• No school or book will teach you what you need to know

• Easy to get far into a project with major problems unaddressed

• Solutions

• Have a mentoring architect assigned to the project

• Architecture reviews by peers

Getting to the Starting Line

• Security and/or clearance issues

• Development infrastructure is complicated.

• Accounts & access requests can take time.

• Solutions

• Note good contacts, use them.

• Develop onboarding scripts and scripts.

Ramping Up to the Build

• Getting oriented to the system can take time.

• It can be 3-6 weeks before any useful development.

• Solutions

• Wikis (but these are only good if kept fresh)

• Strategic, progressive exposure and learning

Bottlenecks and Knowledge Sharing

• Large systems have more potential points of friction.

• Too o!en knowledge resides with one person.

• Solutions

• Wikis (but these are only good if kept fresh)

• Obvious bottlenecks have multiple people trained on them.

Meetings

• Meetings get difficult with more staff

• Either need more meetings or larger meetings

• Solutions

• Frequent scrum meetings on regular schedules

• Meetings with defined agendas and actionable outcomes

Long Engagement Issues

• Boredom

• Personality conflicts

• Solutions

• Cycle team members out at strategic points.

• Keep team informed of the rough length of their engagement, and stick to those dates.

Technical Concerns

Source Code Control

• Need revision tracking and ability to rollback

• Need to make sure developers’ work can interoperate

• Deploy code to production quickly

• Solutions

• Git flow (http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/)

Test, test, test.

• With many developers, huge chance of collisions

• Need to find bugs before they hit production

• Solutions

• Automated testing: PHPUnit, Behat, Saucelabs

Second- and Third Party Integrations

• Drupal team dealing with new technology

• Technologies may not interoperate well

• Second-party integration have politics and turf issues

• Solutions

• Discovery

• Risk Assessment/Mitigation

The Myths of FOSS

• Client expects everything works off the shelf

• You can’t tell a large organization “it works that way”

• Solutions

• Client relationship and expectations management

• Emphasize the triad of budget, timeline, and feature set

The Good Stuff

Big Complex Problems

• Make staff happy

• Makes simpler problems that much easier

Opportunities for Contribution

• Difficulties and complexity leads to interesting solutions

• O!en can generalize these out and contribute back

Staff Happiness

• Long engagements make staff happy (sometimes)

• Large engagements make staff happy (sometimes)

Increased organizational growth

• Larger teams

• Larger budgets

• Opportunities for more complex management structure which results in additional career paths for team members

Skills development

• Large projects means increased opportunity to learn new things

Blessing or Burden?

Yes!

Large Drupal Projects

• Can be fun and exciting!

• Can also be crush your organization and development team.

Questions?

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