Things that Matter
Not a panacea, but trying: Comindwork is attractive
Management tools probably don’t bring to mind excitement and visions of “getting things done” the agile way. Nevertheless, it’s an important aspect of running any project — whether agile or not — and there are some tools, believe it or not, that are easy to use, hugely helpful in managing a project and sometimes even [...]
Why heroes are bad
Most project leaders have been there before: The hero saves the day, yet again. Everyone is grateful because, obviously, if not for the hero the project would have crashed and burned. It seems so lucky that the team can benefit from this all-star who pulls the project out of the fire time and again. So, what exactly would we do without him (or her)?
Making Scrum work: Common failings in adopting Scrum
Scrum can be remarkably beneficial in many kinds of software projects. But, as with any process, methodology or management technique, when used inappropriately it can cause more problems that it solves. In this article I’ll discuss some of the common misconceptions and “lessons learned” as related to Scrum.
Exposing the enterprise to risk: Who decides what not to test?
Testing, testing, testing. In a recent article by John Parkinson (Strong Signals, CIO Insight magazine) the value of testing is raised on par with the activity of design and coding itself: Testing is becoming as necessary a profession as design and coding. Skills and experience matter. Process matters. Tools matter. Let the tests begin. Our [...]
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) [...]
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 [...]
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? [...]
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.
Don’t ship broken software
There are two kinds of organizations: Those that ship faulty software, and those that don’t. Unfortunately, trying to change from one that does ship faulty software to one that does not is nearly impossible—in fact, I’ll go so far as to say it doesn’t happen to any significant degree. Yet at the same time, organizations [...]
Quality assurance as a way of life
Managing software quality is not simply creating a test program during a late-phase testing period. In fact, addressing quality assurance in this way is too little, too late. This far into the software life cycle, defects have become an intrinsic part of the architecture.
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