Template development is a crucial contributor to growth for ClearCalcs and should have an outlined workflow. For the purposes of sprint planning, the following guidelines should be considered at the start of a template development. These guidelines were created with consideration of the current practices that are already being used.

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Iterative Development Process

In December 2022, Laurent and Eva presented upon the process for the efficient, iterative development of templates. Recording available here.

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Key Principles

  • Each increment of work is something that is “potentially shippable” - NOT a final product, does not do everything
  • High-level goal = separate “learning” from “doing” on the ticket
  • Before starting anything, do lots of research
    • e.g. flowchart for how to do a given calculation
    • Then direct user research (poke Anna / Ati / others for who we can talk to) - can ask them to schedule interviews
    • Come with questions, but usually users volunteer a lot more information than asked

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Iteration Strategy

  • First iteration: Just the inputs (NO calculations at all)
    • Add test cases at this point!
  • Each subsequent iteration: Add fully-fleshed out widgets (NOT doing all limit states - but what is added is complete)
    • At each iteration, easy to check test cases because you only need to check the new results added!
  • Big advantage of smaller iterations: Much easier reviews!

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Ticket Specification

  • Ticket spec’ing takes MUCH longer in this process
    • Easily 6 hours to spec out tickets! - effectively, dedicate a WHOLE SPRINT to the spec’ing
    • Do spec’ing in the sprint before
    • “Owner” will spearhead spec’ing process - they’ll do the research themselves ahead of time, but then go through as a group of 2-3 people to discuss and refine
    • If it feels ridiculous how long the ticket work is taking, then you’re good :-)
  • User story tickets in ClickUp are LONG - which means that the reviewer can just reference a checklist in the ClickUp ticket

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Development Categories

During the development of a template, all sprint tasks will fall into one of three categories:
  1. Pre-Template Development Work
  2. Editor Sectional Work
  3. General Final Template Work