Bridge the Rockstar-Manager-Client gap, getter done

It all sounds so easy. Your client says "Can you blah blah blah" and you say "Sure, Drupal can do that!" Give me a couple weeks, month, ... years ... and $100k or $200k or $500k later everyone's looking back. Ok, we knew this wasn't going to be exactly easy. But why is it this hard!?

This session will bridge the Rockstar-Manager-Client gap. It will present a better way for managing large Drupal projects. It is more about process, but will show some specific Drupal techniques.

This session is for:

• Clients who have hired a Drupal shop to create their project
• Drupal Project Managers
• and yes, the Drupal Rockstars, stretching from coder to leader and mentor.

I am known in the Drupal Community for more technical things, such as the coder module. I've spent the last year building a large multilingual social networking multimedia site for a client. As a large year long project, I've made many incremental contributions, but most of these are for 5.x and as such, somewhat obsolete. This is not that talk.

What I have learned new from this year long project, is a better way for managing and developing large Drupal projects. I'd like to share what I've learned and how we're changing our processes at CivicActions. Specifically, I'll discuss:

• an agile process for keeping the development process moving, integrating changing client requirements, and managing client expectations
• quality assurance from ticket management to testing to version controlling
• several specific Drupal best practices