Product Enhancements
Specialized Product Enhancements
Learn about long-term considerations for specialized product enhancements, also known as custom development.
SUPPORT FOR THE LONG TERM
Key Considerations for Specialized Product Enhancements
In general terms, every time a new specialized product enhancement (SPE) is introduced, it becomes part of the live source code. As a result, it needs to be maintained with the same level of rigor as any other feature.
BEST PRACTICE
Key Considerations
for the SPE
Our practices and pricing account for the following illustrative, but not exhaustive, list of key considerations once an SPE is introduced:
- Detailed technical discovery to understand the limitations of and solutioning approach.
- Design of the feature and integration with other UI/UX elements.
- Configurability design - how is this enabled/not enabled for other customers, how does the UX/UI change when enabled.
- Project management to coordinate information flow, work scheduling, dependency mapping and management, release coordination, etc.
- If the SPE deals with external systems integrations or dependencies, future updates will likely be required as the external system evolves (e.g.: API updates on a 3rd party system).
- If new data is to be captured or processed by the system, new operational accommodations for data ingestion, compliance and retention policies need to be observed (ie: monitoring, backups, data deletion).
- Moving forward any new features that get built need to take into account the behavior of the SPE and accommodate for that.
- In the future, if the module or area hosting the new SPE were to be deprecated or reengineered accommodations to handle the custom workflow need to be made, up to and including rebuilding the SPE to comply with new standards.
- Care must be taken to ensure SPEs do not interfere with the standard design (flow and data) of the system in its current or future states.
- Consideration needs to be given to the fact that not all customers may use the SPE, or even have it on, and workflows and data interactions need to be designed, built and maintained taking into account ON and OFF states.
- Manual and automated regression test cases need to be written, and maintained, accommodating the SPE (on and off status for SPEs that are optional).
- Smoke test cases may also need to be accounted for.
- Integration test cases may also need to be accounted for.
- Product documentation needs to be created and maintained.
- Developer notes (code tags, pull requests etc) need to be created and maintained.
- Deployment scripts need to be modified and maintained accordingly.
- Backend infrastructure needs to be reviewed and scaled as needed to support additional loads
- Additional requirements can stem from more users, more integrations, more data being processed etc.
- Knowledge of the SPE functionality needs to be retained within the working teams until it is retired.
By accounting for these key considerations, teams can ensure that specialized product enhancements deliver value for our customers now and into the future.
