I find it kinda funny that if you are asked how long you would estimate to perform a specific task, your answer is always the amount of time you have to finish the task – maybe with 1-2 additional days. Does anyone else experience this? Furthermore, why is the pressure always on the developer? Yes, he gave a false estimation, which can...
In Jeff's latest post on Coding Horror, he talks about the "bad apple" effect: What [the research] found, in short, is that the worst team member is the best predictor of how any team performs. It doesn't seem to matter how great the best member is, or what the average member of the group is like. It all comes down to wha...
What tools or approaches would you recommend to a 'one-man team' to keep organized? I'm doing research that involves a lot of coding, writing hundreds of throw-away perl scripts, C++ binaries that get used until I find some better approach, large amounts of data that gets preprocessed in different ways, where some new preprocessing mak...
My old system involved using Microsoft FrontPage and a frame page. The top frame contained a (tree) list of the tasks and sub-tasks I'd need to do, while the bottom frame contained any useful project information, notes, etc. I'd invariably need to jot down. I used bookmarks in the page to mark major tasks while highlighting current tas...
At the place I am working we are moving to a more agile approach to project management. For tool support for project management I used MS Project and Target Process in the past. But I think they both have serious weaknesses: MS Project is not very intuitive and therefore hard to use especially for novice users. It doesn't really fit ...
When creating New Ticket in the TRAC it shows a selectbox for component in the Ticket Properties. I only have two dummy options: component1 and component2. How do I edit this list? How do I add more components to the project? ...
I am in charge of a database. It has around 126 sprocs, some 20 views, some UDFs. There are some tables that saves fixed configuration data for our various applications. I have been using a one-big text file that contained IF EXIST ...DELETE GO CREATE PROCEDURE... for all the sprocs, udfs, views and all the insert/updates for the confi...
I've been working with SVN for a couple of years and recently been working on some projects involving Trac. It might seem odd for most of you but I come from design oriented background where those tools are not so often used. For the moment we mostly use Basecamp to keep track of client requirements, documents etc. And on the other han...
How do you manage the various resources who have differing life cycles? For instance a project manager will be the busiest during the initiation phase of a project and then utilized at some level (usually not 100%) during the execution/control phase. For developers the high utilization periods are the execution phase and QA towards the...
When working on a project - I always estimate my tasks and calculate how long it will take me to finish. So in the end I get a time-span in which the project should be finished (it rarely is). My question is - do you record your data and assumptions use in your estimates during a project and use them for later projects or refined estima...
I have been a developer for 5 years and recently took a position within my company as a Junior Project Manager. I enjoy this track as I also get to do some coding on the side for bug fixes or quick Perl scripts (I am more of a Python guy myself, but I use what I need to use). At any rate, I have been thinking about getting a Project+ Cer...
I am doing a few tutorials and done some demo applications in Grails. Suppose I have more than one project made in Grails and I want to integrate all these projects in to a single application, how do I do it? For eg: I have made a 'To do list' and 'on-line examination' and now I want to create a new application that would incorporate b...
I am in the process of switching to AccuRev from another SCM. I have quite a few projects and am struggling how to properly lay them out in AccuRev. I have quite a few related projects and would like to keep them in a single depot, but I haven't found out how to separate them so you can keep track of individual projects. In other words...
To make my question clear: I'm experimenting with XMPP, lately - I have set up my own XMPP server and trying to figure out what uses could it have in our development process. Except the obvious things (we use it for IM-ing and have set up a group chat room for our team), we employ it as a notification platform for our issue tracking sys...
As it says on the tin - why do managers care what time I start work? I want to try to understand this, so I can accommodate them better. As far as I am concerned, as long as the person does the job by the deadline, there is nothing to worry about. ...
Hello, I work for a consultancy whose main revenue stream is from client work. We also run projects internally e.g. to implement a CRM system for our sales team. We build release plans for internal projects just as we do for client projects, though resources are often removed from internal projects when required for client work. In s...
I read an interesting blog entry by K. Scott Allen regarding software development "Never Events". I thought this would be a good subject to bring up in this forum. For this particular question I would like to focus on the "Never Events" that are the most important to avoid in a software development project. Please answer with a single...
While the most recent Coding Horror blog entry is not the first time I had heard of the concept, as I was reading it I couldn't help but apply the it in my mind to my own project. The code base I'm working on is an ongoing project at about the 3 year mark now, and large portions of the code in the early stages of the project were writ...
I often find myself fighting overengineering -- the person in charge of designing the software comes up with an architecture that's, way, way overcomplicated. It's all fine and dandy to have all the esoteric features that users will never know about and get that sense of achievement when you're doing something that all the magazine arti...
I'm planing to move project documentation for a fairly big software project from using Microsoft Word files with manual versioning in the filename to storing it in the source version control system. This would all be the type of documentation written by the developer team, release notes, upgrade instructions and administration guideline...