In your practice, how do you effectively track and manage technical debt? Is there a specific metric, like SLOC, that you use? How do you visually display your results to stakeholders and management? What benefits have you seen in the process? ...
What are your experiences regarding project planning and creating hour estimates for new projects? What is the approach you are using, and why has or has it not worked for you? Are there any best practices to take in account? ...
I new to Scrum and while I understand the team concept behind the Sprints, I imagine there still needs to be a guardian for the team who minimizes the interference from Product Owners who are not conversant in software development. What are your successes, and what horror stories have you lived through? Update: I am looking for the ba...
Ideally something as intuitive as basecamp, with good usability and accessibility. The best I've seen is huddle.net but it's still weak in several areas. Must have: Projects - ability to add people & tasks and schedule tasks to people Calendar - showing when people are busy or available Role based access - Admins and non-admins Histo...
I am looking for war stories about why software projects you were personally involved with failed. The more disasterous, costly, or instructive, the better. Good responses should include the size of the project (size of team, length of time, etc) and an answer more specific than 'insufficient planning'. Bonus points for a well-thought...
My C# Protocol Buffers Port uses github for its source control, and I'm beginning to really enjoy using git. However, as far as I can tell, github doesn't provide any project management tools: defect and feature tracking, discussions, feature requests, docs etc. Given my affiliations, Google Code would be a natural choice, but it would s...
I am a junior programmer. Since my supervisor told me to sit in with the client, I joined. I saw the unsatisfied face of the client despite the successful (from my programmer's perspective) delivery of the project! Client: You could have included this! Us: Was not in the specification! Client: Common Sense! As a programmer, how do you ...
Anyone out there using Fogbugz and Scrum together? We use Fogbugz extensively, and I'm looking for ideas from anyone who may be using it as part of Scrum. I found these two items, but they are archived and unvailable for further discussion. I'm specifically interested in ideas for mapping Scrum concepts into Fogbugz. Some things are fa...
It took me some time, but I've finally managed to write down all the tasks that need to go into Version 1.0 of the software product I'm working on. The list is almost 1000 items long. We are a 3-person team, and we've somehow managed to get this far using MindMeister, Google Docs, @todos in the code etc. Now, I have everything neatl...
Hi, any books on project management/ design you guys can recommend? I am looking for a practical hands on approach, nothing heavy on theory. Update For 1-man development projects, what book would you recommend so I can plan the project, what needs to be done exactly, tasks, estimations, etc. ...
I'm working on a project that has fairly large scope and a lot of work to be done. One of the members of my team has a great work ethic and is very bright yet a little defensive. The problem is, he takes on too much work and delivers everything late. I need a way to say to him, "stop overloading yourself" without turning off his enthus...
Hi all, I am currently doing a little study over Sonar and (why not) other tools to manage code quality. I did not found the documentation much clear nor extended and I have some questions. Does somebody know and use it ? How can one integrate sonar into a complex project ? Can we manage a Perl or C project with Sonar & Maven 2? I wo...
I've never forked a project before so I'm a little stumped as to how to proceed. I have a project that I use on my own that I release as a BSD licensed project (Project A). At work I want to use that code but with modifications specific to our company (Project B) but I want to be able to still update with features that come from the base...
Good day all, I'm the "lead developer" for a major Excel based application that handles the production of a few mine sites. It talks to a bunch of databases, tries its best to help out users, and generally clunks along just fine through a mix of Solver, VBA, and in cell formulas. Our development team is tiny and is composed entirely of...
From wikipedia: Prediction markets are speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions. Assets are created whose final cash value is tied to a particular event (e.g., will the next US president be a Republican) or parameter (e.g., total sales next quarter). The current market prices can then be interpreted as predic...
Hi, In our company we are currently using CVS for project documents, status reports etc, shared folder for installables/product documentation etc and some teams use Wiki (I don't know for what?). Now, I am confused as to where to put what. It would be great if could describe what tools you use in your setup and for what purpose. EDIT: ...
Hi I feel a need to show my screen to other people. To ask for help or show how to do things. I also feel a need to report on my progress, like with twitter-like report style. That information don't fit in the mailbox. (or I don't whan't do dump in other inboxes.) What applications exist or do you use to get that done? (screendumps, ...
I started to read the "Head First Software Development". I like this series, especially for their design patterns book. But I would like to switch to something fundamental and serious after this one. So what is your recommendation? ...
Hi, I'm consulting at a traditional business that has almost zero understanding of software development. They are justifiably concerned about how to measure our progress, & productivity and are currently looking for way to measure this. Obviously, I'm concerned they will adopt some easy to measure, but bogus strategy. (ie: Lines of C...
Someone within my organization has started pushing for us to pilot the CMU SEI's TSP process (see website here). I have an instinctual aversion to any attempts to cure software development illnesses with alphabet soup, but I would like to know if anyone has experience with this process and can provide tangible facts. ...