What are the best set of details to give to a programmer to define a project? Simply put, I know what I want done, but I know nothing about programming and so what is the best way to define my project to a programmer so he/she gives me what I need. i.e project summary, design brief, flow charts? ...
What features might our team find lacking if we adopted Basecamp for bug tracking, task tracking, external documentation, collaboration, and project management? I've used the free version before and think that 37Signals makes excellent products - but I wanted to hear from you what the drawbacks might be. ...
I'm about to undertake a personal project, but I'm having trouble coming up with background information in the problem domain. I have some experience, and Google has provided me with more, but I'm still not sure that I have all of the information I need. If you have ever been in this situation, either at work or on your own, what did you...
I'm currently in the process of becoming a maintainer of a small open source project (a Facebook toolkit), and of course, one of the responsibilities is to answer user questions on our forum. While I'm happy to help users learn how to work with our toolkit and deal with issues they may run into (which may eventually indicate bugs in our ...
As the title suggest... How can I apply a scrum process to anything that doesn't work on new code and can be estimated to some degree? How can I apply a scrum process to maintenance and emergency fixes (which can take from 5 minutes to 2 weeks to fix) type of environment when I still would like to plan to do things? Basically, how do I...
Hi, Does anyone know any source of examples and templates for software requirements, build environment description and other kind of documentations that are common for software development? Thanks! ...
Joel often talks about using MS Excel for lightweight project management, but I'm curious about actual implementations of this idea. I've seen some templates that seem to clone MS Project via macros, which would be overkill for a lightweight project. Anyone have any useful templates? ...
Suppose you're the product manager for an internal enterprise web application that has 2000 users and 7 developers. You have a list of 350 future features, each ranging from 5 to 150 developer days of work. How do you choose what features to work on, and how do you run the release process? Here's what I'm thinking: (skip if boring) R...
Consider having an unstable, incomplete, and not completely tested system. Then consider needing to demo it to the customer. The system being unstable, incomplete and not completely tested because an external supplier was not delivering what they promised and when they did deliver it is really bad code. After pushing back, and pushing b...
We user JIRA for bug tracking and release management and we have started using greenhopper for project management inside of JIRA but one thing that it lacks is the idea of user stories versus tasks in those users stories. Does anyone recommend other task board like agile project management tools that fully support users stories and task...
I'm thinking about starting work on a fairly large scale .NET or ASP.NET project (I haven't decided yet, but it is likely that, eventually, it will be accessible from both a desktop application written in .NET as well as an ASP.NET web application). However, I'm not sure if there's a conventional way to structure the project. The projec...
Is there any scientific data available regarding the impact on delivery time due to switching between tasks? Peopleware (IIRC) suggests it's half an hour per switch, but I feel it could be a lot higher. ...
My project invovles me to make a lot of changes on the production code. The requirement keeps coming up and I need to make changes and deploy it as soon as possible. I sometimes end up creating patch work sort of code because some of the requirement would not fit into the overall design of the software. How can this be handled effectivel...
I've been working with my manager to move myself from a designer/programmer role in to a lead designer/programmer role. I have several years experience in programming. I've not became that "super" programmer that I've always wanted to be but my manager said that he thought I'd make a good team lead; I’ve since been put in charge of a c...
Observing one year of estimations during a project I found out some strange things that make me wonder if evidence based scheduling would work right here? individual programmers seem to have favorite numbers (e.g. 2,4,8,16,30 hours) the big tasks seem to be underestimated by a fix value (about 2) but the standard deviation is low here...
What books should someone who manages programmers read? This includes supervisors, internal customers and project managers. Vote for what you think or add it if it doesn't exist. ...
Give short concrete answer: why unit testing did NOT work out for you (your project). Will you particularly try again on a different project? ...
Hi, Say we are creating Acme CMS. This CMS web application will allow you to create an unlimited number of categories with sub-categories (unlimited depth), and each category can have 0+ content pages associated with it. So this project, at a high level will have: Front End 1. index page 2. category page with list of content pages...
Some of the work we do at my company is slowly edging towards a product family with different products in the same family and different flavours (or feature sets) in each product. I am looking for some product line engineering techniques that might help us. Web search leads to a lot of resources and a lot of different sources of informat...