Does anybody have any recommendations on software to use for managing resources on multiple projects? I work in an internal development department and the team typically has 3 or 4 projects that are live at one time as well as day to day support and ad-hoc requests. I currently schedule them using MS Project but this seems to be designe...
The workgroup at my company is considering creating a wiki to store information that everyone may find useful. It would contain anything from tips/links on new technologies used on projects to internal procedures/guides for the servers we have set up. Has anyone had experience with this? Right now we're mainly using Sharepoint to keep...
Hello, I work as a Project Leader. I am trying to do project postmortem for projects which my team works on. Currently I use Wiki to note down problems, issues and final recommendations. But it makes hard to note down every problem we noticed just when it happen, so we miss some issues. I'd looked for some software which could help m...
Brad's recent question "How much of your work day is spent coding?" got me thinking about the abstraction layer you want to create for your developers. I am a big promoter of giving my developers what they need to get the job done. I hope that my developer's spend about 80% - 90% of the day coding. One thing that helps me do that, is ...
In an agile team, who's responsible for firing those that consistently fail to contribute? Should the individual recognize he might need to move elsewhere? Should the team bring up the matter, or should the manager take care of it? Any advice on how to do this as humanely as possible? Also, how do you protect yourself from attacks? Deve...
Our organisation uses PRINCE2 for every project we run; IT is large part of our organisation but we're not a software house. Whilst I appreciate PRINCE2 is a great method of running projects, and, we've had a lot of success with it, I feel it's fairly high level for the nitty-gritty of building software. Is it unheard of to run an AGILE...
I'm currently looking at the following stack: Apache Tomcat and Apache HTTP Server for web interfaces Chandler for time tracking and coordination and Chandler Server for bringing everything together. Trac for bug tracking and user feedback management (eg - dumping user feedback into the wiki, adding bugs, SVN tie ins) Subversion for ve...
Thinking about getting into .net technology project management I've had plenty of experience with PHP projects: I'm aware of most of the existing frameworks and libraries, and I've written specs and case studies based on this knowledge. What should I know about .net? Which top resources would you recommend me to know so I can rapidly l...
When you to develop web applications from scratch, what are the skills needed, to produce usable and interaction-rich products? Do you do UI Prototype first? Do you use User Stories? Some agile methodology or best practice you'd recommend or actively advocate? In short: What skills make you transcend from requirements gathering to A...
I've seen different program managers write specs in different format. Almost every one has had his/her own style of writing a spec. On one hand are those wordy documents which given to a programmer are likely to cause him/her missing a few things. I personally dread the word documents spec...I think its because of my reading style...I a...
The facts: The other programmer is constantly slipping deadlines with no status updates, at the moment he is slipping the single biggest feature on the website (which he asked to work on) by 3-4 weeks from his initial estimate. The people for whom the software is being written fear taking action against the other programmer because the...
Every programming job I've had has required me to track my hours, entering them into a system once a week. I've never been good at it. For the past few years, I've been running Timesnapper* on all my machines, and on the night before hours were checked I'd slog through the records and painstakingly enter the hours in. The alternative, o...
What are some of the day to day things you do in your dev team that help build your team's morale? ...
What's the best way to organise my personal TODO list? and what tools are available for organising team TODO lists? Should I still be thinking in terms of TODO or are there better ways to manage my time and projects? See also this question on Organization which is similar ...
One of the elements of the Joel Test is that you have an up to date schedule. What tools do you use to create and maintain your project schedule? How often is it updated? ...
I got into a mini-argument with my boss recently regarding "project failure." After three years, our project to migrate a codebase to a new platform (a project I was on for 1.5 years, but my team lead was on for only a few months) went live. He, along with senior management of both my company and the client (I'm one of those god-awful co...
I'm planning to introduce project post-mortems to the business I work for. I think they will improve development-client relations. Encourage feedback and improve the quality of service to clients. However as I have never done them before I don't have a format to follow. What is the Post-Mortem procedure you use? Are there any anti-pa...
I need to extract data from a .mpp file on the network and combine it with other data from several different databases. The application can be written in Perl, VB6, VB.net or C# but must be easily scheduled from a Windows based server. What would you recommend to extract the MS Project data with no user intervention? Is there any ODBC...
For me a multistage environment contains environments for development, testing, quality assurance, maybe a client review stage and finally production. It should allow easy collaboration between developers, project status tracking and easy deployment of the application to any stage for a specific version. You can propose specific tools ...
As project manager, your required to organize your time so that the project meets a deadline. Is there some sort of equation to use for estimating how long development will take for let's say the database (like time = sql storeprecedures * tables manipulated or something similar) or are you just stuck having to get the experience to get ...