best practices
The Weekly Review as an OmniFocus Project
Automation can be a wonderful thing when used right. With information overload at an all-time high (see Is Google Making Us Stupid) it’s a challenge to reap the benefits while avoiding the pitfalls. Systems such as OmniFocus and other GTD-oriented solutions can be hugely successful when adopted — and consistently used. Fraser Speirs has documented [...]
Why projects fail 101
90% of projects do not meet time/cost/quality targets. Only 9% of large, 16% of medium and 28% of small company projects were completed on time, within budget and delivered measurable business and stakeholder benefits. [Standish Group Chaos Report, 1995] There are many reasons for such failures. As per a KPMG survey of 252 organizations, technology [...]
The case against releasing early
In Releasing Early Is Not Always Good? Heresy! author Jason Cohen discusses the reasoning behind “release early” and the argument against. He points out the pitfalls of the rapid-development-early-release paradigm, and introduces a few practical ideas to avoid them. While I don’t agree with all his points (and would add many of my own), it’s [...]
Memory aids
Good management needs good memory. That means being able to remember everything, no matter when you think of it: While I was at the beach getting ready for some ocean kayaking, it occurred to me that I hadn’t spoken with Chris about some new widget development concepts. I tap the screen on my phone, and [...]
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.
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.”
Formal inspections: An introduction
The price of software problems is very high: As much as 50% of development and 100% of all maintenance costs can be attributed to software defects. Often, this price becomes apparent late in the software life cycle—quite often after the software has reached its operational phase (after the software ships)—as previously undetected defects are discovered [...]
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 [...]
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