Where to start building up solution?

    We have passed kickoff negotiations and concluded that we have keep on building new platform from sketch. Our team and customer is leaning to be agile as possible, so we immediately started from elaborating use case. Our initial plan is following:

1. Login to the system
   
2. User management tool
   
3. other ...
   

    Is it a dream? Or deja vu? I have seen so many projects which started namely from those two items: login and user management, that I think there must be something enchanted and supernatural in those items.

Why login and user management is so important?

    Although login functionality is in 90% cases are the same (login, password, attempts to login before being locked and forget password, of course: nothing special) everybody wants to start from this. Probably because it's very evident part of the front page of any website.
    But pay your attention: this is nothing that can distinguish your web solution. In fact if you want to place on front page your logo and news and public speech of your CEO it would be further more recognizable and authentic. Don't you think so?
    Ah! I see: you still not sure what kind of info should you place on the front page. That makes difference: probably let's do easy start with login and password fields
    What then?
    Yes, sure we have very very sophisticated user management. Here how much roles we have, how to assign roles and groups to user, how to specify and handle rights of them on reading, writing and view profile of the assets?
    Wait a bit! Do we REALLY have assets in our system? Or any other entity? And do we really know what END-USER should see on our web page?
    In a second I realized an evidence: we DO NOT KNOW what our final user is going to see, but we already put efforts to build up user management tools ...
    I have a question: what kind of user do you have in your system? The answer would be (let us imagine a bit):

1. Administrators
   
2. Extended users
   
3. Normal users
   

    And what is distribution of those users?

    Can you believe that? Our users are mostly common users and they are community we creating system for! Why do you so anxious about administrator UI, rights, obligations and privileges until you don't know what user should see?
    Well, administrator is a God in system and if we wrote Bible today we probably started from definition of God.
    This may be a reasonable way to found new religion, but enterprise system is not The Universe and not something we should worship (Sometimes it is really considered to be like this). Let's try to think another way: try to imagine what your usual user should see in your system. Do you have a few arguments why he actually should use the system? And finally if you have perception about

• what user should be able to get from the system (features and information)
  
• what user should be not able to get from the the system (security)
  
• what is our benefit in the system?
  

    Does it mean that you can find out what is needed from user management, security, automation and so on just if you know aforementioned points?
    You probably will blame me, but my personal answer on the latter question is YES. Indeed, security rights, user management or any other management exist to allow user to have services they want to have, charge them for those services and to not allow them make harm to other users and system itself ...
    Even if your system is difficult for administrating but very friendly to end-user it can have success, but if it's not friendly to end-user whatever you have in back office it makes no difference for outworld anymore!

How should we start?

    Ok. Let's try to start with very small things ...

    I have a question: what kind of user do you have in your system? Answer is

1. Normal users
   
2. Extended users
   
3. Administrators
   

    Oh! That's much better! Let us think about normal users first :)

Good luck!