Archive for the ‘Managing Software Projects’ Category

Mention the word Agile to anyone in software development and you’re likely to get a strong reaction. The person will either jump down your throat if you even merely hint at suggesting at implying that it may not be absolutely, completely and without a doubt the most perfect way to manage a project EVER (blessed [...]

Software projects are different from other kinds of projects. I believe that while general purpose project management theory gives a good grounding in basic project management, it’s not enough to be a successful software manager. Software development is regarded by some as the most complex intellectual activity known to man. The model of “command and [...]

The vast majority of developers believe that form follows function. They say things like, “Who cares what it looks like! As long as it works.” They write-off user interface design, aesthetics and ergonomics as “graphics and icons”. In high-end cooking schools, the chefs spend a considerable amount of time learning as much about presentation as [...]

…not many people claim to be rocket scientists but everyone thinks they can design software.

Anyone know the statistics on how many people can or can’t pat their heads and rub their bellies at the same time? Even if you can, you have to admit, it takes significantly more concentration and focus than you would guess, for something that looks so easy (when someone else is doing it). And we [...]

Padding schedules for risk is not an incredibly new strategy. But to do it properly isn’t as obvious as it might seem. When you’re sitting down staring at a schedule, most people think they’re being pretty clever by tacking on 30% to the end of their schedule and calling it buffer. There are a number [...]

Joel writes: Making simple, 20% products is an excellent bootstrapping strategy … What works for bootstrapping, I believe, will not work as a good long term strategy… Alec writes: Why do hot-tubs come with sound systems? People buy features. You may not need all those features. You may never use all those features. But you [...]

One reader recently brought up the subject of using Story Points as a unit of measure for the “effort” or “duration” of a feature or capability, rather than estimating effort in days, weeks or months. You may have stumbled across this practice if you are following one of the variants of the Agile development movement. [...]

On Monday night, Ottawa had its first CaseCamp. One of the presenters was Mitch Brisebois of TrueContext (company) and SensoryMetrics (blog). I’ve long believed that “Good Enough Isn’t”. It’s just one of those things I’ve felt in my gut and I’ve tried to use as a guiding philosophy when building products. Trouble is of course, [...]

I have a pet metric that I call Time Estimation Error. It’s the percentage of time that a person is over or under, on average, for all of their time estimates over a given period. For example, if over 10 tasks, a person estimated 20 days, but took 30 days to do, their Time Estimation [...]