As a programmer working in an insurance office, I have a nasty little management hierarchy which is making programming much harder. At current, our IT department rates a three on The Joel Test, which worries me. I'd like to fix this, but management enforces an insanely aggressive release schedule. Basically every project is due "yeste...
I'm fairly well read in the benefits and processes of Scrum. I get the ideas on the backlog, burndown charts, iterations, using user stories, and other various concepts of the Scrum "framework". With that said... I work for a web development firm that manages multiple projects at one time, with six team members that make up the "product...
My company has recently started using Scrum; we've done 2 sprints. We're still learning, but we've definitely exposed and fixed some problems in our development process already. So in general I think it has been good for us. In reading many of the internet musings about Scrum from evangelists, cynics and everyone in between, three commo...
My firm just got its first large-scale development project inquiry and I would like to use an Agile process. The client has a vision for the application but openly admits to having very few requirements and recognizes that we will have to charge by the hour. Because of this, I've all but sold him on an Agile approach. The problem is tha...
Managing Projects Was not marked answer and all their responses where exclusively for bug tracking. I am more interested in how it compares to other Project management software like CodeBeamer. The full Change Request, Bug, Tasks, Knowledge Mgmt (wiki), Discussion, and others. I also looked at this other question but find the same inf...
Or they (team members) need someone to keep pushing? Edit: The above line was supposed to be sarcastically funny. Sorry to throw you guys off. I am talking more in the lines of distributing that work within the team, and not having one person assume and/or perform project management activities. ...
As a dev team we are under a lot of pressure (internally) to provide accurate release dates to our customers. How should we go about this? The problems we see are in defining exactly what is required for each release and in not knowing how our priorities are likely to change during a release. We are using FogBugz and think that we c...
Ok, so the client is insisting that I make a control that is essential to the website I am doing (it's the nav) into something that, frankly, no one would know what it was much less would click on it. I mean, this isn't an opinion issue, he is straight out wrong. It's not revolutionary. It's not different. I just think if we took a .jp...
This is not a programming question, but I figured I would ask in here, since there are a lot of professional coders. Let me know if you have any suggestion on the software we could use to manage a technical department. I currently work for programming shop, employing about 30 people. We have different software products that we provide t...
I work for a small software development company and we currently lack support/bug tracking/software license software so in an effort to better ourselves and de-stress because of a lack of easily accessible information we're looking for some software. Without going into detail, our size means we work a different way to most other support/...
I am currently a senior in college and part of my research is to come up with materials that could be used in a course about enterprise web application development. I am taking the opportunity to learn about agile methodologies when developing software, but the course is going to be more about managing the growing number of technologies...
For the company I currently work for, I've written a quick prototype to add some stuff to an instant messenger. Because it had no public APIs, I had to work on a really low level stuff using both C and inline assembly. It's interfacing with an undocumented DLL, which is pretty picky about it's input, and although I've spent a great deal ...
I would like to adapt my development team from a very singular development team (one large development per developer), to distributed workload (on the same projects). Has anyone else undergone this change? What is the best way to implement seperation of work, team-spirit, documentation etc? ...
Several years back Joel posted a list of books for the "Fog Creek Software Managment Training Program." Which of those books have you found most useful? I'm looking for recommendations on where to start. A little more detail about me to help with the answers. I have been programming for quite a while now. It's been mostly lower-leve...
During our iteration planning, we frequently find ourselves in the same position as this guy - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/425044/how-to-estimate-a-programming-task-if-you-have-no-experience-in-it I definitely agree with prototyping before you can give a reasonable estimate. But the same applies to anything that needs a bit of a...
We're using Scrum on our current project and we're very happy using our agile board and cards but reporting, burndown charts etc. are somewhat cumbersome to maintain. So, we're looking for good agile software to use instead. I'm keeping requirements deliberately vague but does anyone have any recommendations? The software would need t...
I have a project in mind, here's the pitch. When I come to a new workspace, school, a friends computer and want to check all my favorite blogs, log into facebook, SO and all other amazing websites. I find that it's always a site that i forget to visit. The solution to this is to bookmark the site. However, should I always store the book...
In a consulting company where the general thought of TDD and automated testing as a whole is appreciated by the programmers but thought of as "been there, done that, doesn't work" by management, how would you convince the powers that be to approve the investment of time and resources to implement such an approach? So, to be specific, th...
Do you use any tools to create a work breakdown structure? If so, do you find they help or interfere with the process? ...
i recently had a client say i was focusing too much on the project management process on his project. my reply at the time was "the project management portion of your project only takes up about 10-15% of the total project time" <- yes, the answer itself is even bureaucratic :) it is the first time ever ive had a client complain im doi...