Not a single line of code has been written, nothing has been tested, the hardware is not even in the right location, yet by 10pm on Sunday night (June 5th), we expect to launch the beta of TransferBigFiles.com. So why am I so confident that we'll be able to get this project done by 10pm on Sunday, even though we're not going to start it until 8am Saturday morning?
Part of the plan to build the TransferBigFiles.com site was to design the project during serveral lunch sessions prior to the start of implementation. As excited as we are about this project, we didn't want to lose sight of the fact that Axosoft is all about helping software development teams deliver their projects on time. (TransferBigFiles.com does not stay true to this montra). So we decided that work time will be spent on improving Axosoft's OnTime product line, while play time (Friday afternoons, lunches and weekends) can be spent on whatever crazy side project we come up with. So far, we've spent about 4 hours on TransferBigFiles.com and we have setup the hardware (actually, Jonas setup the hardware) and we have a simple design for our site:
As you can see from the whiteboard session, the design is super simple. 3 SQL tables, 1 web app, a simple web service and a simple cleanup Windows service all running on 2 physical servers will make up the entire site. Spending lunch-times on the design didn't work so well, so we literally came up with this design late this afternoon in about an hour and a half. I'm sure we're going to hit some major hurdles over the weekend :-)
I also drew the “front-page” of what the final site should look like. This hand drawing is done on a tablet PC, but it should convey the idea:
So the combination of the whiteboard session along with the drawing of the main page of the site gave us a good list of all the “Features” that we need to implement. We entered our list of Features into OnTime, estimated the time to implement each feature and it looks like we have about 20 hours of work to complete. Since our estimates assume pair-development, that's approximately 40 man-hours of work:
None of these items have been started yet. We will begin at 8am tomorrow morning...stay tuned.
By the way, if you missed the first few blogs about TransferBigFiles.com, take a look at these: