Oscar Merida

March 17, 2015

How to Evaluate Your Developers

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Why?

• Choosing the technical team will have a profound effect on your

• schedule,

• budget,

• overall satisfaction.

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Who am I?

• 15 years experience.

• Websites for varied clients.

• Built projects small to large.

• Worked on internal and external teams.

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It begins with an RFP

• How do you choose from the respondents -

• Lowest price?

• Best looking proposal?

• References?

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Team backgrounds

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Who’s on the team?

• Do they list developers in the proposal?

• Are developers highlighted on their website?

• Do they advertise for on staff developer jobs?

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Are they vocal online?

• Active on twitter

• asking for and giving help

• plugged into the community

• Writing about what they learn

• company blogs

• personal blogs

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Do they contribute online?

• Using github.com to share projects

• Contributing to other projects

• patches

• documentation

• tutorials

• Check for github.com profiles.

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Do they contribute to Drupal - drupal.org?

• Asking for and giving help in issue queues

• Contributing & reviewing patches

• Maintaining projects

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˜

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Are they active offline?

• Attending or speaking at local meetups and events?

• Attending or speaking at conferences?

• Sponsoring any of the above.

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Technical Proceses

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Writing software is still more of an art than a

science.

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But there are tools and practices of the craft that good developers

are using.

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How is progress tracked?

• Version Control Software

• Track history of changes

• Facilitate collaboration

• Issue trackers

• Overview of development status

• Outside of email, documents.

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How are changes deployed?

• Typically 3 stages:

• development → staging → production

• Develop locally

• match stage, production environments

• Ideally, deployments are automated

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How are Drupal changes managed?

• Drupal 7 solutions include:

• features module

• strongarm module

• update hooks

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What testing is automated?

• Automated testing can find bugs earlier

• Help identify if new functionality breaks old functionality

• Drupal 7 includes simpletest framework in core.

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What coding practices are followed?

• Teams follow a coding standard

• Drupal has its own coding standard

• Commits should undergo a code review

• Identify bugs, improve solutions, share project knowledge

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How are projects managed?

• Project manager is single point of contact for clients.

• A technical lead provides design guidance, coordinate developers.

• Internal and external check-ins provide constant feedback.

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Drupal Expertise

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Drupal is awesome

• Easy to build fairly complicated sites by wiring the correct modules together…

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…except when it’s not.

• Opinionated about how to implement solutions

• There’s more than one module for that

• though sometimes there isn’t one

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Media handling

• Default media handling in Drupal is poor.

• Media module vs. Scald vs. others

• Easy for content editors to manage media uploads

• Easy for site visitors to play media.

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Integrations

• Frequently need to integrate with other systems (CRM, Payment, etc)

• Identify what modules are available

• Evaluate trade offs and costs

• Expertise to write custom integrations

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Don’t ignore admin users

• Content editors are your most active users

• Customize admin interface to make writing and editing easier

• More than just WYSIWYG

• Customize admin form layouts

• Use better widgets for fields

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Which modules for:

• customized layouts - Panels vs Context / Display Suite

• managing breadcrumbs

• sending HTML email

• mapping

• … “How do you evaluate a module?”

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Security is important

• Securing and managing user accounts.

• Policy for applying security updates

• Paying attention to best practices when writing custom modules.

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Performance & Scaling

• Configuring settings for better performance “out-of-the-box”

• Better caching layers (Redis)

• Scaling high-traffic sites with Varnish

• Scaling sites with high user activity.

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Thank You!

• Twitter: @omerida

• Editor-in-Chief php[architect] magazine

• plus Conferences, Training, and Books

• www.phparch.com

• Any Questions?