Manage your upgrade project: from Requirements to Execution Plan and Issues List

[Udar Gromov]

Based on my personal massive WordPress upgrade project I realized that I created and maintained used 3 documents:

-1- Requirements
-2- Steps
-3- Issues

 

Requirements

Requirements is a list of features that you must have after the upgrade.  You review what functionality you currently have and record a business requirement:

 

– Bilingual comments template at the bottom of every post (visitors will see all approved comments for this post from all other users)

– Contact US form (private questions to our editors)

– Ability to view recent users and sort them by date

– Display Date modified in post meta

– Display links to Disclaimer and About pages

– Search both posts and forums

– Exclude Sport Web Center post from home page

– Visually distinguish Sport Web Center posts by displaying a different header image logo

 

One important lesson here is not to write how, but only what.  This list should remain as far as possible from solutions.

 

When Requirements (REQS) are complete, you can jump into implementation.

 

Design and Implementation

As soon as start solutioning, you need to record what difficulties you experience (Issues) and what steps did you take to move forward (Steps).

 

Issues

 

Issues list should have a date and status columns.  Record of problems and solutions achieves two main time-saving goals:

– record problems while you are focused on something else to resolve later

– reference a solution if you ever encounter that problem again.

 

Steps

 

Steps are needed as a road from your current state to a future upgraded state. Steps are needed to record procedures and their duration.  I compose my Steps list with as much as information as possible.  I include links, users, password, SQL statements and duration.  I will go through these steps several times until Go-Live date, when all need to work smoothly and effortlessly for one sleepless night.

 

If a given step only needs to be performed once I mark it with a green color as completed.  I also found it convenient to categorized my steps by activity type, for example Browser, Domain, Linux, phpMyAdmin, puTTY, Synology, WinSCP. In other situation this could be replaced with module or department name.

This list transfers my upgrade project from a random collection of tasks into a road map.  Tested.  Repeatable. Transferable.

[WilliamNug]

What media center are you running that with? I have been trying to do something similar but havnt found an rss feed that I really like.

[Author]

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