Are You in a New Project?

Hi,

You are new to a project. Maybe you have just changed jobs. Or an opportunity has arisen internally - whether you wanted it or not.

Your first day. You really don’t know anything about the project. So almost nothing.

You know what it’s about. You may have even tried the product yourself.

But you don’t know what the architecture looks like. You don’t know how many services the product operates. What they run on. How they’re interconnected. Where the data is persisted. Is it relational at all?

You really don’t know anything about the inner values. You only know the outside.

How do you proceed now?

I’ve been in this situation many times. As a young developer, I had no strategy. You take what you can get.

In the best case, you have a good mentor. He knows you need nourishment. He approaches you. You are in the passive role.

The more experience I gained, the more I knew what I didn’t know. And that helps. I was able to independently demand information. I just asked.

As I became more and more experienced and went through more and more projects, my strategy changed again.

Now I shape the first week in a new project myself. As a consultant, this is naturally expected - but I wouldn’t do it any differently as an employee. I organize sessions with the right people to delve into a certain aspect of the product.

From the outside in. In doing so, I orient myself strongly to the structure described by Arc42 .

I start with the product. I need to understand not only how the product works, but why. Why is the product successful? Why should customers prefer our product to the competition? Why do we do A and not B?

Then it’s on to the technology. Starting with the Scope and Context and the Whitebox-View . Which services and actors use the system? And what components do we have within the system?

Then I look at the deployment. How do we build the components? How and where do we deploy them? What environments exist? And what purpose do they serve?

Only after that do I go into details.

Depending on the focus, I take a closer look at the code, the pipelines, the database design, the web layer, or wherever the shoe pinches.

These sessions are always well received. They not only help me get started in the project, but they also help the team, which hasn’t looked at their own application from a step back in a long time.

Are you the active role when you start a new project? If not: Start doing it!

Rule the Backend,

~ Marcus