As a new developer who is the only software guy on staff I have faced a few challenges but possibly the most difficult has been time estimates. I strugle every time I have to give a project estimate. My question then is; If I do not have any experience and I don't have a fellow dev in my environment, how do I provide a solid estimate? ...
Hello, I know this is probably the nth project management question. But am trying to move my team onto a more robust project management technique. Am wondering what is the best technique to use? I know that probably no technique is best, but which are the most popular techniques? Poker planning? Evidence Based Scheduling? COCOMO? Agile?...
I currently have three independent projects on my plate - each requiring development in a different language. There's a WCF Web Services / Windows Forms project in C# .Net 3.5, a web site in PHP with generous javascript, and maintenance on a legacy Windows application written in VB 6. Because I'm switching so often, I frequently start ...
To execute an Agile project you first need a contract. No contract – no project! No project – no Agile, SCRUM or whatsoever! The contract, if we are talking about mid to big projects, must have well defined safety triggers. I.e. customers want to be very much sure, that if we agree on ending a project in time = T, budget = B and scope =...
I'm currently in the middle of porting a fairly large Perl The problem is that it uses little Perl tricks to make its code available for useing. I've done about the same with Python, making the codebase one big module for importing. I've had a firm grasp of Python for a long time, but I have no experience with large projects written in P...
G'day, I have been involved in a project that has required my becoming familiar with several new technologies because several tasks were left off the project plan. I just figured that I'd dive and and learn what was needed to get the various jobs done. Generally, this learning was done on my own time. So far the list of technologies I ...
I have done some work with Ruby on Rails but am still not comfortable writing a Rails app from scratch. My problem is that I am not able understand how to get the right model going when trying to write the application from scratch. I thought seeing the code of a complete existing application may help but am not sure. What should be the w...
We have a single developer working on 3 different projects. He used to work on bug fixes, maintenance and few feature implementation. In one specific project, he works with one more junior developer. Our company wants to implement scrum for all the projects.. What is the best way to handle the scrum process for 1 or 2 person project? ...
How can I manage multiple SVN repositories/trac instances easily? I have a bunch of projects that I want to consolidate into a single authentication scheme. Also, I want to be able to enable plugins for every project and configure a bunch of trac options for multiple projects all at one time. It would also be nice to be able to add and ...
At work we're using NUnit, FxCop and some other tertiary software on our projects. Right now we have the project files for each app stored in the project's repo and the software is installed per developer machine (well... currently only one, me). We're hiring a couple other developers in a few weeks and I'm trying to set things up to b...
I have an interesting idea for a new programming language. It's based on a new programming paradigm that I've been working out in my head for some time. I finally got around to start working on a basic parser and interpreter for it a few weeks ago. I want my new language to be successful and I want to eventually create a community arou...
I am looking here for some hints and tips on how to manage multiple versions of a projet. Currently I have a development version of the application which includes some improvements and new functionnalities. In meanwhile I have to do some bug resolving. It is easy to fix the bugs on files that have not been touched by new functionnalitit...
I have two projects, with identical priorities and work hours demand, and a single developer. Two possible approaches: Deliver one project first. Split the developer's time and deliver both later. I can't see any reason why people would choose the second approach. But they do. Can you explain me why? ...
In our development team we create many small applications, all targeted at a very specific needs of our customers. Therefore we often have problems with creating a uniform user experience regarding: Choice of icons (GUI) Naming of configuration files Naming of configuration options GUI language (as in "formal or less formal" or "for ...
I've read a long time ago an article about why managers should appreciate the devs., and there was analogy drawn to the 7 samurais movie: that a company can't really offer much to an engineer, and that the engineer chooses to help the company -- like the samurais helped the villagers. I thought that was on joelonsoftware.com, or codingh...
I'm working on a web based medical billing code search engine for my software start-up that will let users search for ICD-9 (and related ICD-10, clinical codes) medical codes used in medical diagnoses and medical billing. The problem with building the data files for the search is that the Center for Disease Control only releases the fil...
I've been making small scale projects for a while now. I haven't started a large project, yet, because I haven't come across anything which I needed and wasn't already accomplished by some other FOSS. Until now. I want to make a program which will allow users to interactively learn secondary languages (I'm kind of want to make it as cl...
I was having a discussion about technical debt with a coworker yesterday. I said something to the effect of "well, maybe what you need to do is declare 'technical bankruptcy'". In other words the amount of technical debt in the project has gotten so out of hand (we're talking 10+ years of a variety of developers and managers working on o...
I'm involved in a prototype development. We can't say that it's completely prototype development. It's partially following the processes defined within the organization. As far the customer concerned it's a prototype development. The problem is documentation. We don't have any time estimated and scheduled to prepare the architecture des...
what project management tools / softwares do you use and how does it supports managing the requirements, some kind of traceability to the implementation, bugs, etc. ? ...