Software Best Practices

One spinoff from the 10x difference in programmer productivity was the Chief Programmer Team structure. The idea of the chief-programmer team was originally developed at IBM during the late 1960s (Baker 1972, Baker and Mills 1973). It was popularized by Fred Brooks in the Mythical Man-Month (Brooks 1975...

Our IT group supports a large research and development organization. We have 100+ active projects now, many of which are package implementations (given the amount of configuration & interfaces, these are non-trivial development projects). We also have many pure software development projects where...

As i stated in another forum , if you have money to spend and are doing agile development, Rally has set the bar that everyone else should be measured against.

Hey thollis, Hands down, the best product out there for this is Rally . Spend 2 hours with their free (10 user) community edition and you will know what Agile Project Managment should be like. The only issue is the price. The are asking $39 / user / month for their middle range SaaS offering, and $65...

Also Known as: How I Spent My Summer Vacation My big project this summer was building a fort for my kids. I'd wanted to build a clubhouse or treehouse or fort or something for the past few years, but we didn't have a good place to put it. Then while clearing some blackberries in the spring I...

If we are talking about straight scheduling and resource software, I use OmniPlan. It's a Mac only product, for those who have them. It is the easiest to use scheduling software I have come across. My main problem with MS Project is that half the time when I click something I am not quite sure what...

Change is inevitable on a project. It doesn't matter if you using agile or plan-driven techniques, you must embrace change. Agile embraces change by being very responsive -- they point out that the future is unknown, so they just look to the near term. Plan-driven techniques are used when the customer...

Have you maintained software whose code bears little resemblance to its design docs and comments? How many times have you seen a detailed and diligently maintained schedule, which is regularly presented to management with lots of green and red highlighting, but which no one in the trenches thinks has...

Well, maybe not all of them. Some are so pretty, that uniform cascading of well ordered tasks trickling downhill to perfectly coincide with the deadline. Get color prints made, frame them, and hang them as abstract art. Don’t use them to manage your software development. Balance is an important part...

I really do. I mean, all those details you have to keep track of. Everybody coming up and asking you questions like you have some clue about what is really going on. And of course you pretend like you do. "Why, were are three days away from the googoo gate." What I really want to say is, "I...