Getting To Know Microservices – Project Management

As the first activity towards adding the microservices paradigm to my application I wanted to do a brief planning session in order to give this little project some kind of a frame. I have to admit though that I was a bit surprised as there isn’t too much I can add to a potential project plan at this very moment.

Most of the activities to be performed (and with that the candidates for user stories) are only going to become clear after at least the first session, which should be all about creating a target architecture. Based on the new components added and changes drawn for existing components it can be seen what this would mean in terms of additional stories.

Nevertheless there is a set of activities which can be done at this point. Besides painting the target architecture I want to exercise a quick evaluation phase where I look at new technology. At the very moment I expect to “only” introduce one new component being an API gateway so I want to get a better feeling what is available in terms of products.

Finally (in the spirit of agile) there should be one use case in the context of Harvee that would allow me to try out the new technology. Hopefully I can find out quickly if it makes sense to go ahead with it or if I have to make changes to my decision.

As I mentioned previously I am using Pivotal Tracker when it comes to the planning side of things. Please see below a screenshot of the current Kanban board I am using. I had to realise that my velocity regarding previous sprints has not been impressive at all. However this is hopefully going to change with this epic.

Btw. while writing this blog post I also read this article, which gave me a very good introduction to the topic here. I got specifically inspired to think more about the stability of the services I will write as well as to introduce testing right from the beginning of my journey.