Power Platform project planning and management

[JoAnneCharlotte]

Hello,

I’m looking for some advice. I work for a small business and we’ve just hit the 2nd anniversary of our core PowerApp. We’ve grown a lot in 2 years, from me working solo with one app to having 6 apps, 120 flows, 3 BI reports and now I have 3 team members.

As it was just me for the first 18months I didn’t setup a dev or test environment. It’s now getting risky working on live and we more people we want to have robust processes to manage our dev projects, testing and rollout. As we work within Operations I’ve started research on DevOps.

What I’m struggling with is the start of our lifecycle - how to track requirements, documentation for apps & flows. How does everyone document their power platform apps & flows? Track progress from requirements to deliverables? Do tools such as Visual Studio & GitHub work well with the power platform? Does anyone have any success stories with Power platform & Azure DevOps?

Any advice/signposts to help/FAQs would be greatly appreciated 🙂

Thanks in advance 

Jo-Anne

[ryanspain]

Hi there,

Thankfully, I think much of what you are looking for can be found in the Microsoft Power Platform guidance documentation. This documentation is truly very comprehensive and covers everthing from establishing a Center of Excellence (CoE) to real-world examples of solution architectures.

Speaking specifically to your points however:

"How to track requirements, documentation for apps & flows?"

The guidance suggests that you create an internal wiki and community. You could:

1. Create a SharePoint or Teams site for a wiki documenting the solution for end-users. See 
2. Create an Azure DevOps project to manage requirements, techincal documentation, and ALM.

Reference:

• Create a SharePoint team or communication site or Create your first teams and channels in Microsoft Teams
• Dani Kahil did a great 2 part series on capturing requirements in Azure DevOps. See Part 1 and Part 2.

"How does everyone document their power platform apps & flows?"

This is a subjective matter but personally, I use a combination of:

• Inline/self documentation: Adding descriptive names to components, descriptions on columns/views/forms, comments in cloud flows, etc.
• Azure DevOps wiki pages: This covers the general solution implementation functionally and technically. I'll always make reference to apps and flows by name and how they fit into the bigger picture (the problem they solve and what features they boast). Typically each wiki page will contain at least 2 primary headers called 'User experience' and 'Configuration'.

"Track progress from requirements to deliverables?"

Azure DevOps works well for this. Ideally you will have a set of requirements (work items) that will be developed in your dev/build enviroment with all the changes commited to a dev branch in source control. Every deliverable should be documented in the wiki and the wiki page linked directly to the work item (epic, user story, task, bug, etc). Once requirements are built, they can be deployed to downstream environment in an automated fashion or manually. I suggest getting on the automated build and release train early. Check out the guidance documentation on the CoE kit for info on setting this up.

"Do tools such as Visual Studio & GitHub work well with the power platform? Does anyone have any success stories with Power platform & Azure DevOps?"

Yes - tools like these help a lot. It improves the developer/maker loop by saving time for other things. In every customer project I have worked on so far, there has been heavy use of tools like Visual Studio/Visual Studio Code and they array of popular extensions that make working easier.

• The Power Platform Tools are in preview and help with a host of environment management options.
• The Microsoft Power Platform Build Tools for Azure DevOps make automating solution build and release processes easy. They are constantly being enhanced.

Hope this information is useful!

[JoAnneCharlotte]

Thank you so much!!!