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Project Startup Guide
This Wiki page is designed to help students in universities start team-based course projects.
To start, review the product vision, the product roadmap, and the ecosystem management roadmap. You should pay attention to the features that are planned for the year you start working on the project. These prioritized milestones are what you should work on during the semester. Depending on team composition, your teams may be able to complete an epic from the product roadmap and ecosystem management roadmap.
You may also benefit from reviewing the Competitor Benchmarking Matrix
After understanding the vision of Open FinAL, take a moment to review the current management approaches used within the Open FinAL ecosystem. These approaches are based on Agile management principles from the Scrum framework for teamwork and the scaled agile framework (SAFe) for cross-team collaboration, along with other management frameworks.
To successfully communicate throughout the semester, as a minimum, you will want:
- Communication Platform: Discord/Slack/Teams (check whether this already exists)
- Project Management Software: GitHub Projects/Jira/ClickUp/Trello (check whether this already exists)
- Shared Filesystem: Google Folder/Google Drive (check whether this already exists)
Per the approved Management Approach, the following positions should be established:
- Product Manager - role description in Management Approach documentation
- Release Train Engineer - role description in Management Approach documentation
- Systems Architect (if software engineering will occur) - role description in Management Approach documentation
Individuals should self-nominate for a position and submit a resume and cover letter for review to the advisor in charge of the class/ecosystem.
The advisor may also seek feedback on the candidates from class/ecosystem members through a survey.
The advisor will then appoint individuals to the roles.
After reviewing the roadmap and management approach, work with others to create a project charter that aligns with the roadmap priorities and ecosystem management approach. Please follow the subsections below to help you develop a strong charter.
An epic is a large chunk of work that can be assigned to one or more teams. Look through the roadmaps to identify which epics are assigned to your class. Read through the epics to understand the work you will need to accomplish over the project time period.
Part of the charter will require you to identify what teams need to be created and who will be assigned to what team. To do this well, you will need to assess the skills that will be needed to accomplish the work in the assigned epics. You will then determine who in the class possesses these skills and at what level.
The following Excel spreadsheet offers a simple talent assessment template to download and store on your shared file storage system.
Create the teams to complete the work for the epics. Use the results of your talent analysis to help you assign members to teams, ensuring that each team has the necessary talent to succeed. Be fair and thoughtful in your assignment of members to teams.
The talent assessment template has a column for team assignment and a sheet that tracks how many people have been assigned to each team.
Per the approved Management Approach, the following positions should be established on each team:
- Product Owner - role description in Management Approach documentation
- Scrum Master - role description in Management Approach documentation
- Technical Lead (if software engineering will occur; this role provides technical mentorship to the team)
Team size: when possible, teams should not exceed 6 individuals
Reporting structure:
- The Product Owner reports to the Product Manager
- The Scrum Master reports to the Release Train Engineer
- The Technical Lead reports to the Systems Architect (if software engineering will occur)
Write a project charter to outline the purpose of the project, key stakeholders, the scope of the work, roles and team responsibilities, expectations and governance, your management approach, and project risks and constraints.
The project charter template contains questions to help you write a charter.
If you will be contributing to development of features within the software, go through the Installation guide. Please note that this is for development of the software for software development and testing, not for software use. Upon completion of the instructions, you should have a working version of the codebase.
Before you begin planning or working in the software on your assigned epics, be sure to review the Technical Documentation.
All who contribute to the software should at least read the documentation about the Core Systems Architecture.
If your task includes work on an existing feature, you will also want to review the Feature-Level Documentation for the feature to make sure you understand the packages and files used for the feature.
Once leadership is in place and your teams are established, begin breaking down the roadmap epics your team was assigned. To do this, you will:
- Review the work required by the epic assigned to your team.
- Functionally decompose the work required for each epic into detailed tasks that you can assign to individuals or pairs on your team.
- Do the following for each epic that your team was assigned:
- Within the assigned epic on GitHub, click the "Create sub-issue" dropdown and click the "Create sub-issue" option.
- In the window that pops up, click on the Task/Story template.
- Create a meaningful title for the task.
- Fill out the sections of the template.
- Before saving the task, click the Label button and select two labels:
- The label for your team number (ex. Team 1 or Team 3).
- The label for your class (ex. MIS 3200 Spring 2026).
- Click "Create" to save the task.
- Repeat this process for each task associated with the epic.
- Using the "Assignees" under each task, appoint a member(s) of the team to complete the work.
Once you have functionally decomposed the epics into tasks and assigned tasks to individuals, everyone can begin working on the project.