The Ready-to-Code Checklist

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

This is a repost of a very old Tumblr post (remember Tumblr…?) for the sake of mine and others’ reference.

Original Post

I’m currently working on a Thing for a Client, and I’m reminded of the rules that we used to have for doing Launchpad development. One of them was the Ready-to-Code checklist. Googling “Ready to Code” brought this up as the third result, and since it’s still relevant to me, I thought I’d repost it for general consumption.

s/Launchpad/$YOUR_PROJECT/ as appropriate.

The Ready-to-Code Checklist

If you can answer every question on this list clearly and convincingly, then you are ready to code. If an answer is “no”, provide a compelling reason as to why.

• What is it?
• Why you are doing this now?
• Who is this for?
• What value this will bring to our users?
• Do you have a list of representative users / stakeholders?
• Have you talked to them?
• What are the constraints on possible solutions?
• Have you talked to another Launchpad hacker about this?
• Do you have a list of the UI workflows for the feature?
• Do you have mock-ups for these workflows?
• How will you know when you’re done?
• How will you know how well you did it?
• How will you resource ongoing maintenance of that which you are about to do?