Do you inflate your estimated project completion dates?
Do you inflate your estimated completion dates? If so why? How much? I tend to inflate mine a little because I can be overly optimistic. ...
project-management
Task Life Cycle
What task life cycle do you follow? and do you mingle tasks and bugs together in the tool you use? A typical Task life cycle is: Not Started - entered but not yet started In-Progress - being worked on Complete - task is done with the exception statuses of: On Hold - waiting for something Canceled- the task is no longer needed, possib...
Evidence-Based-Scheduling - are estimations only as accurate as the work-plan they're based on?
I've been using FogBugz's Evidence Based Scheduling (for the uninitiated, Joel explains) for a while now and there's an inherent problem I can't seem to work around. The system is good at telling me the probability that a given project will be delivered at some date, given the detailed list of tasks that comprise the project. However...
Is it possible manage developers with high turnover if you can't lower the turnover rate?
I lead a small group of programmers in a university setting, having just moved into this position last year. While the majority of our team are full time employees, we have a couple of people who are traditionally graduate assistants. The competition for these assistantships is fairly intense, as they get free graduate school tuition o...
How do you create change logs for your projects?
Hi, I am using subversion as an RCS and Bugzilla for issue tracking. And i just ask myself how to create automatic change logs for the users? I already tried the "svn2cl" tool. But the change logs it creates are to technical for me (e.g. no user want's to know that developer XY changed 20 files yesterday to fix a memory leak). A user w...
Are there any tools for privately showing a customer progress on their work, and having discussions with the developers?
My boss tasked me with finding a sort of system for a customer to be able to log into a website and view their website as a work in progress (so employees would obviously have to be able to upload their work). All communication would be handled through this website. It sounds like a forum, but customers would not be able to see each oth...
How do I build a great game development team?
Gamasutra has a couple of very interesting articles Hiring Game Designers and Building A Great Game Team: Measuring Progress Neither of these talk about the hiring process of building out the team as a whole. I believe that great development teams, no matter what you are building, are like rock bands. You can't have a band with all g...
Dealing with awful estimates
A recent project I worked on was proven to be severely underestimated by the architect. The estimate was out by at least 500%. Unfortunately I was brought onto the project after the estimate had been signed off with the customer. As senior dev, I quickly realised that the functional and technical spec. contained some huge gaps and unc...
Of all the commercial projects you've personally worked on, how many have been canned/succeeded?
I don't mean personal projects. I mean projects where there were a number of people involved and business dollars were spent. ...
When do you blow the scope creep whistle?
Most people have been here at some point or another - in your project, you get really small requests along the way that you're happy to take care of, but at some point the little things add up. Sometimes it takes less time to implement something than it does to re-negotiate the project plan. Providing the spec/requirements plan is decen...
Evaluating software estimates: sure signs of unrealistic figures?
Whilst answering “Dealing with awful estimates” posted by Ash I shared a few tips that I learned and personally use to spot weak estimates. But I am certain there must be many more! What heuristics to use in the scenario when one needs to make a quick evaluation of software project estimate that has been compiled by a third-party (a col...
Managing multiple code branches and deliveries
I work for a small one-product one-customer company that is transitioning to a one-product, multiple-customer company. Even though we've had just one customer, we've had different projects with different delivery dates, but for each project we've been able to deliver the latest monthly release which we've kept in a separate code branch i...
Are you coding against existing applications or working on new projects ?
How has the current economic downturn affected the way you/your team works ? I am tending to do more enhancements, compared to brand new development a year or so ago. This question came about during another pub conversation where we were discussing if it's good to work on supporting applications or working on new projects - which is ...
How to convince "The Management" to use all aspects of Visual Studio Team System ?
Currently we have several defect and bug tracking systems, which include Quality Centre and bespoke support systems (both team and company wide). Also we use Microsoft Project - although I haven't seen a task list in months... But what I find difficult to understand is why our company purchases VSTS and only utilises part of it - we c...
How to announce backward incompatible changes in OSS project?
Sometimes you need to introduce backward incompatibile changes, when the improvements far outweighs the downsides. It is possible to easily switch to old behavior, but the user must be aware of such changes. Therefore the question is: how to announce future backward incompatible changes to FLOSS (open source) project, so that users can ...
When should you break backwards compatibility?
I hate capricious projects that change at the drop of a hat. I hate projects which are overly complex trying to maintain backwards compatibility. Where is the balance? When maintaining a project, what should one take into account when deciding to break backwards compatibility or not? How much effort should one put into conversion util...
Why should my team adopt source control?
I have the opportunity to give a formal presentation to my boss about anything that benefits the company. My idea is to adopt source control in my workplace. I have been using Mercurial to manage my own project at work, but the rest of the team does not have a formal source control system in place. Unfortunately, I'm not very good at p...
Introducing agile practices in a subproject only?
Imagine you work as a contractor in a large project involving multiple systems, and you are creating one of them. The whole project uses a traditional process, but there are smells that tell you that an agile process would be much better. Now the question. Does it make sense to introduce an agile software development process in your own...
Should project manager ask how much time will it take to implement some functionality?
Our project manager usually consult developers how many hours they need to implement some functionality asked by client. Is this consistent with the principles of management? Do you or your project managers do the same? ...
How to work in a team where half the devs write logic in code and the other half in stored procedures?
I'm currently working on a team that has half the developers thinking in terms of "objects" and the other half ignore the concepts all together. It's starting to make working together more difficult because the OOP guys (myself included) want to build reusable components that can be leveraged across the system, but the SQL guys just cre...