The Non-Technical Person's Guide To Building Software & Apps

Learn to use AngelList to post for a full-time mobile developer, set five-plus years experience, and define salary and equity ranges.

Identify cost drivers—region, seniority, and engagement model—from agencies to freelancers and employees. Balance cash and equity, including sweat equity for founders, to maximize ownership and incentives.

Learn how to find and vet developers using the right sources, conduct behavioral and technical interviews, and select the right talent for your startup.

Learn how to find and vet candidates through three interview stages: phone screening, behavioral/non-technical interviews, and the technical interview, while listening for passion and validating experience.

Learn how to conduct technical interviews by starting with technical questions, verifying coding ability in a controlled environment with online tools, and using whiteboarding to distinguish engineers from developers.

Evaluate candidates with a candidate scoring worksheet, rating cost, technical competency, and communication; narrow to a few finalists, then offer, negotiate, and onboard the best fit for development.

Waterfall maps projects to linear phases—requirements, design, development, testing, deployment, maintenance—with no early testing; agile uses iterative cycles with different people at each phase and responds to customer needs.

Discover agile fundamentals through four core values and 12 principles, prioritizing individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and embracing change.

Identify the drawbacks of agile, such as uncertain scope and limited documentation, and learn how teams address these by design with informed customer collaboration.

Explore Scrum within agile frameworks, compare it to Kanban and XP, and outline what Scrum is, why it matters, and how to apply it.

Learn agile and scrum basics with Trello to manage the product backlog, sprints, and task status from backlog to done, including burn down charts.

Understand software configuration management (SCM), its importance, and version control tools; track changes to code base and software environment with an audit history.

Discover why software configuration management matters: create an audit trail of changes, quickly rollback defects, and replicate environments across development, staging, and production using version control like GitHub or Bitbucket.

Master software configuration management through version control concepts, including main line and development line workflows, branching, merging, and concise commits to keep code stable and auditable.

Explore Git, GitHub, and Bitbucket as distributed version control with repositories, branches, commits, and pull requests, and understand hosting, master and development branches, open source vs private access.

Understand devops fundamentals and why it merges software development with IT operations to deliver faster, higher-quality software via containerisation, CI/CD, automated testing, and deployment.

Explore how application containerisation abstracts apps from their environments, using Docker to ensure portability across Windows, Mac, and Linux. Understand development, staging, and production environments, and how they power deployment.

Deploy containerized applications by leveraging container orchestration to automate deployment, scaling, and networking across cloud or on-premises environments, using Docker images and automated load balancing.

Define test cases as inputs, actions, and expected outputs to verify features. Tie test cases to acceptance criteria and focus on validating code handles valid and invalid inputs gracefully.

Craft and assess test cases from user stories for a book barter app, ensuring login-required product listings and front-end form validation.

learn how to execute test cases in staging, log defects as Jira or Trello tickets, and prioritize bugs within backlogs and sprints for effective QA.