As a freelancer I have to interview with clients at least occasionally. Based on Really “wow” them in the interview I came up with the idea of putting together a checklist for the first discussion. Although the topic is similar to the other thread, I believe that there are differences between looking for a job as employee or as freelancer.
- Target group:
- Business, consumer, internal usage?
- Number of users?
- Project life cycle: For how long will it be supported? Extended? Replaced? Terminated?
- Architecture:
- Client/Server?
- Is there a user front end (rich client? web?) or is everything running in the backend
- Any databases involved? How?
- Messaging queues?
- Which platform(s) are supported respectively planned?
- Development style:
- Waterfall? Rapid Development?
- Task granularity: do you assign one task to a certain developer or is it handled as a team?
- What is the average size of a milestone? Who is responsible for the definition of milestones?
- Who is responsible for the specifications?
- What methods/tools do you use to coordinate the developers?
- Do you have dedicated testers or is testing handled by the developers only?
- Do you use automated tests? At which point in time do you create them?
- Are there development guidelines in place (i.e. Naming Conventions)?
- Do you use source control? Centralized or Decentralized ?
- Is there a backup strategy for development data in place?
- Bugs and feature requests
- Do you use a bug tracking tool? Is it accessible for the end users?
- What is the procedure for customer feedback respective feature requests?
- Build process (if applicable):
- how frequently do you create builds?
- are automated tests part of the build process?
- Project team:
- What is the team structure
- Who is the decision maker? Which reporting lines are in place?
- Tasks:
- Which tasks should I fulfill? One or several projects at the same time?
- What are the 3 most important tasks I should finish within the first 1/3 of the project duration
- Personal:
- Do you have any concerns about me fulfilling the responsibilities of this position?
I believe that the list covers the most important topics, but is a bit too long. Please let me know what you would add or remove. Many, many thanks!