Detailing the Scope and Design of Your Initial Release

Following the hard work, you did in Part 1, The Pre-Development Phase, this first chapter in the development phase of your Salesforce project will guide you through key activities and milestones. Next, we cover how you break down the high-level scope you defined in the pre-development phase into user stories. Then, we will cover how to determine an appropriate level of upfront architecture, and what Salesforce architecture artifacts you should create. Finally, we’ll discuss how to understand user story solution design and illustrate your target solution architecture.

The chapter provides best practices for creating user stories to maximize the chance of developing the right solution for your business. We describe which solution design artifacts you should create and maintain throughout the development phase of your Salesforce project, and beyond!

In this chapter, we’ll cover the following main topics:

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Overview of the development phase of your Salesforce project

This phase of your Salesforce project is the one architects, business analysts, project managers, scrum masters, and developers are most familiar with. The focus is on detailing requirements, designing solutions, and building and testing them.

Let’s take a look at the milestones of the phase.

Key activities and milestones of the development phase

The phase starts at project kickoff where the project manager, business leaders, architects, and project sponsor introduce the project vision and nature to the project team members onboarded at this point.

After the project kickoff, the next key milestones in the development phase are as follows:

• Detailing the scope of your release
• Completing the solution design of your release

Note

The activities to reach the first two milestones are sometimes referred to as the prepare phase, as the project is preparing to start building the solution.

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Detailing the scope of your initial release

Your project’s next endeavor consists of translating the vision and capabilities – business processes – into product backlog items. Breaking down the business capabilities into smaller backlog items requires you to involve the end users of your Salesforce solution through a series of workshops.

In Chapter 3, Determining How to Deliver Your Salesforce Project, we discussed the three overall delivery methodologies to choose from – pure waterfall, hybrid agile, and pure agile.

As we are covering a hybrid agile delivery methodology in this section, let’s consider the activities to prepare for development:

• An effort is made to establish foundational architecture including – but not limited to – determining a Salesforce org strategy, integration, data migration, data backup and archival, and reporting strategy, as well as a development and environment strategy
• Detail the business...

Creating the solution design for your initial release

The user stories created for the business processes collectively define the scope of your Salesforce project. Although the solutions for each user story collectively make up your technical solution, you will benefit from considering your overall and end-to-end architecture to some degree before starting development.

Let’s start by looking at the architecture artifacts and components you should have create and maintain as part of your project – and beyond!

Understanding Salesforce architecture artifacts

Governing the documentation for your solution is a key responsibility of the Salesforce CoE.

While the source of the documentation components may be your implementation partner, it is your Salesforce CoE’s responsibility to ensure that the solution documentation is available, up to date, and understandable for the intended audiences – both business and technical stakeholders.

Let’s...

Summary

You have made great progress throughout this chapter. You were introduced to the key milestones and activities in the development phase of your Salesforce project. Next, you learned how to break down your business processes into user stories with acceptance criteria. Then, you were introduced to the Salesforce architecture artifacts that are key for your Salesforce project. Finally, you learned how to evaluate and interpret the proposed solutions for your user stories and illustrate your target solution architecture.

Now that you Having established the foundational architectural runway and solution design for your Salesforce project, you are ready to move on to the next chapter of your Salesforce implementation, Chapter 7, Building and Testing Your Initial Release.