Awesome Project Questions

A list of questions that engineers / architects / managers should ask before the start of a project.

Contents

• Background Research List
• Questions to CEO
• Questions to technical specialists
• Functional Requirements
• Non-Functional Requirements
• Other

Background Research List

• Company Research
  • Investigate information about company in the Internet
    • News
    • IPO
    • History
    • Customer's feedbacks
    • Open analytycs and statistic
  • Information About Business
    • Business domain specific
    • Glossary
    • Big players & competitors
    • Typical technical solutions, services & integrations
  • CEO, CTO
    • Technical & business background
    • History of work
    • Areas of interests

Sources for reasearch: company web site, google, linkedin, FB, articles, alexa.

Questions to CEO

• What are the goals of the project?
• Project
  • What are the project parts, modules?
• What are you expecting from our cooperation?
• What is the problem that we should resolve?

Questions to technical specialists

• Architecture
  • What is the current architecture?
  • What are there main disadvantages and advantages of the architecture?
• Infrastructure
  • What is the current infrastructure?
  • How to deploy the project?
  • Do you have any issues with the infrastructure?
  • What is the cost of infrastructure?
• Technologies
  • Could you describe the tech stack?
• Data
  • Current database
  • Data structures
  • Size of data
  • How to integrate or migrate data to new solution?
• Development
  • Source
• Deployment
  • Deployment tools and processes
  • Envs?
• Testing
  • How to test the project?

Functional Requirements

• What are the goals of the project?

• Project

  • What are the project parts, modules?

• User

  • Who are the users of the project?
  • What are user roles?
  • What are the use cases?

• Data

  • Where should the data of the system be stored?
  • Are there any legal and regulatory restrictions?
  • What are the data formats?
  • How long data should be persists?

Non-Functional Requirements

• General idea, how to measure quality attributes?
• Conceptual integrity
  • Do we have part of the project which does not follow the goals of the project?
• Performance
  • What is the daily usages?
  • What is the peaks of usages?
  • What is the behaviour of usages?
• Usability
  • What is the list of supported devices, browsers?
  • Should there be separate versions for mobile and web?
  • Should the project be accessible for people with a different range of disabilities?
• Security
  • Are there parts of the project with different access levels?
• Scalability
  • Should the project have the high loads peak?
• Reliability
• Maintainability
  • What is expected and acceptable downtime of the project?
  • Are there any time periods when the project can be unavailable?
• Testability
  • How test engineers can test the project?

Other

• Plans
  • What is the deadline?
  • What hast to be considered to meet the deadline?
  • When should the project be launched?
  • What are the risks if the project is delayed?
  • Are there any conditions, blockers, or anything else that may cause the project to fail?
  • Is there a growing plan for the project?
• Budget
  • What is the budget for the project?
  • What is the payment model?
• Stakeholders
  • Who is the project owner?
  • How the responsibilities are assigned for the project according to the RAM?
  • Are there availability dates for stakeholders from the matrix?
  • What are the best communication channels with stakeholders?
• Risks
  • Are there any risks with project success?
• History
  • Are there older versions of this project?
  • Is there an architecture of current project?
  • Are there list of tools used in the project?
  • Is there a dedicated development team for the project?
  • Are there any tasks in progress?
  • Are there any third-party services involved in the development of the project?
  • How to get source of the project?