Process and Schedule

• Do they understand the commercial software development cycle? Do they use an agile approach, or waterfall? (Waterfall-sprinkled-with-agile?) Are they religious about it? Zealots?
• How do they define “done”? (Or alpha, beta, release, etc., if those terms applied to their approach.)
• What kind of schedule was their last project on? Did it last weeks, months, or years? How long were iterations/sprints?
• Have they ever worked on a project that released late? Failed to ship at all? What happened, and why? (And if all their projects shipped on time, to what do they credit that success?)
• How did specifications or user stories fit in? Who wrote them? How were changes handled?
• Was there dedicated QA? What were its responsibilities? How did they interact with QA? What do they expect out of a QA team?
• What kinds of release processes have they encountered, and how do they work? Devops? Hand-off to ops team? Continuous deployment? Send a master disc image to the manufacturing plant in Ireland?
• Where did project management and/or program management fit in?
• What other groups in the company have they interacted with, and what was that experience like? Product management? Documentation? Marketing? Business development?
• How did their endgames work? What kind of effort did they (personally) have to put in to get the product out the door? How did they (team or personally) manage change and minimize risk during the endgame?
• What were some trade-offs they had to make during the process? What bug did they feel worst about deferring, and why did they defer it anyway? (Candidates who think software ships without bugs won’t be happy in the real world.)
• What have they learned from projects they’ve released? What would they change on their next project?

Next: Team-Sized Projects