Software cost estimation: Where’s the silver bullet?

Recently Kirk Gray wrote a piece — more of a plea really — titled Software Estimation is Hard. The problem at hand is that there doesn’t seem to be a silver bullet that delivers accurate software project cost estimation. Software cost estimation (and here, I mean “cost” in the sense of effort, time and money) [...]

Scrum and Agile becoming widely accepted

According to an informal poll conducted by Cranky PM, Agile methods (Scrum in particular) has been penetrating deeply into the enterprise. Specifically, in 2006, you reported that a sizable majority of product development used a waterfall methodology (55%), with Scrum garnering a mere 7%. In 2008, the picture is very different. Scrum and its Agile cousins [...]

Rational Scrum opens for business

It may still be a bit rough around the edges, but Rational Scrum is open for business! Welcome!

Rational Scrum

Recently I tried out a variant on methodology that I’ll dub Rational Scrum. I’ve been trying to put together a few thoughts about the overall process for months, and finally found some time for it.
Just as people have specializations, so do processes. Applying one process to all situations is just as wrong as calling your [...]

Recommended reading

Looking to learn the fundamentals of Scrum? First and foremost I’ll recommend a short hands-on course, but if you can’t swing that try “Agile Software Development with SCRUM (Series in Agile Software Development)” (Ken Schwaber, Mike Beedle) and “Agile Project Management with Scrum (Microsoft Professional)” (Ken Schwaber), two definitive works on the subject.

White-board to wall-space ratio

Patrick Wilson Welsh has a great little rant on this really incomprehensible trend. I think the root of the problem is that too many companies still think of software development as an industrial, assembly line process and too few have really embraced the idea that it’s a creative effort.

Finding strategic learning funds

Training Industry Times recently published some rather disappointing statistics: Over 92% of surveyed business have experienced pressure to reduce their training budget in 2007. Worse, 56% reported that the pressure to reduce or altogether cut training costs were “significant.”
Is this attitude regarding education part-and-parcel of the declining attitude toward education in the United States? More [...]

Whole teams

An operational, successful team is more than a set of interchangeable, anonymized skill sets. Would you buy a car that had never been tested in a safety lab? Of course not, and yet the software industry, particularly the commercial industry (as compared to Military, for example) has been ploughing along without whole teams for decades–a trend that seems to be getting more and more negative attention.

Cohesive teams

I really liked this post by Patrick Wilson Welsh about the The Fallacy of Individual Accomplishment. Yes it’s true, your heads-down cubicle dwelling knowledge hoarders are more of a liability than an asset. And while we’re here, let’s all just recite: “Hero Culture Is Bad.”

The case for certification

I had to read the Agile Alliance’s position on certification a few times before I could decide whether I liked their position or not. Part of this is that the opinion is not that well written. Getting past that, I came away with these core statements:

Employers should not require certification.
Non-skill-based certification testing procedures have little [...]