Keywords: Shiny, Project Management, Product Management, Best Practice, Stakeholder Management Shiny development is exploding in the R world, especially for enabling analysts to share their results with business users interactively. At Mango Solutions, the number of Shiny apps we are being commissioned to build has increased dramatically with approximately 30% of current projects involving some aspect of Shiny development. Typically, Shiny has been used as a prototyping tool to quickly show business the value of data driven projects with the aim to productionalise the app once buy-in from stakeholders is gained. Shiny is fantastically quick to get an app up and running and into the hands of users and additional features can be rapidly prototyped for stakeholders. In this presentation I will share with you our experience from a client project where Shiny prototyping got out of control- the app was so successful for the business the pilot phase quickly evolved into full deployment as more users were involved in “testing” without production best practice implemented yet. I will then tell you how we faced into this challenge which involved client education and the planning and implementation of the required deployment rigour. I will also share our thoughts on how to approach Shiny prototyping and development (taking on board our lessons learnt) depending on the app’s needs- you can still quickly implement features with Shiny but with a few recommendations you can minimise the largest risks of your app getting away from you.
