Bare Naked App

Our problem is that if we don’t set out exactly when and how things are going to happen the likelyhood is that they won’t happen. Or at the very least take a lot longer than it should do. So we need to pin down exactly how long it will take us to build our new app and set a deadline for the finished application.

We decided to allocate time for each section of the building of the app based on what we had learned from our first app, DropSend. We started at the begining and allocated time for each thing we had to do - we didn’t build in any time for ‘things to go wrong’ but we did add some contingency at the end. So the following represents our ‘ideal’ timeframe for the building of the app.

Usability
Perfecting the wireframe - 3 days
XHTML for the wireframe - 1 week

Design
Designing the web app UI - 3 weeks
XHTML for the UI - 1 week
Coming up with a name - 1 day

Code
Development of the web app - 4 weeks

Website
Writing the copy - 1 week
Design of the pages - 1 week
XHTML for website - 3 days

Extras
Contingency and Launch - 3 weeks

Total = 15 weeks

Firstly we gave ourselves a deadline. We decided that we must have a designer and developer in place, with contracts signed by 31st March. This would enable the whole process to begin.

Once we had the timeframe set we could go ahead and set milestones in Basecamp so that we knew what should be done by which date. Because some of the work could overlap (ie the coder could be working on the development while the designer was working on the website) the whole process would not take 15 weeks from beginning to end but nearer to 11 weeks.

We set these deadlines:
31st March - wireframe perfection finished
6th April - XHTML of wireframe finished
10th April - site copy written
13th April - changes to XHTML of wireframe finished
13th April - developer and designer start
27th April - UI design finished
27th April - XHTML of UI starts
27th April - website design starts
4th May - XHTML of UI finished
4th May - website design finished
10th May - XHTML of website finished
1st June - Code for app finished
22nd June - App launched

Sounds simple doesn’t it?