When giving a time estimate for a project that includes work in areas you don't have experience with how do you estimate? In most cases it is hard enough to get the estimate right when the project's areas are familiar. What methods have you used in these cases? How well did they work? ...
We have a four person development team that is in need of a formalized project management system. I have a general understanding of Scrum and Kanban but it's hard to truly understand until it's been tried. We don't have the luxury of trying one for a few weeks and then switching to another so I was hoping that someone out there in a si...
Why are "cause and effect" diagrams also called "fishbone diagrams" ? What is a Fishbone Diagram? ...
Was hoping to find something relevant in the "related" box ... Is there a good emacs project management plugin somewhere? I'm just playing with new gnumacs and need something simple; something which is gonna keep several files together tied with the project, and enable me to compile them (pretty much just put their names in with the co...
The findings came from NICTA’s study of 400 projects shows Most projects that had no schedule were successful The choice of requirements methodology does not matter; UML was "no help". In the U.S. (but not elsewhere), developers are involved in project estimation only when there are poor requirements. and the surprises goes on. Wha...
Most developers know how a project should be managed. You should follow the software development life cycle. You should gather requirements and come up with a design beforehand. The code should be nice and readable, and you should follow principles like DYR. The end product should meet most, if not all, of these requirements: Developme...
Other than just saying read Mythical man month, how would you explain to a project manager that although two programmers will do close to twice the work of one programmer, 10 programmers probably wont do 10 times the work. ...
I'm trying to justify a MS Visio license. Immediately I can think of a few ways that I would use it in my shop, and apply it to my development projects: ER Diagrams UML Diagrams Project Management (WBS's, org-charts, etc.) Documentation I know these things can be done in MS Word's drawing tools, but as far as I'm concerned, they loo...
Hello, Let's say you have a specific project on hand, it can be divided to parts, and you are not completely sure about all the difficulties that will arise. Time is of the essence. How do you decide whether a part should use software product or your own code? (considering, that some tools are awesome, but will require much time to lea...
Having the "one push build" to take your changes from development environment to live server is one thing that is very nice to have and often advocated. I came on board with a small team running in a LAMP stack and use SVN for version control, currently deployed on a single production server (another server for development and soon to...
Please provide your inputs as management perspective. What initiatives one should take to make sure every project manager is following risk management processes. I would like to follow Risk Driven Project Management across all projects? what should I do to implement RDPM successfully in my org? What are the approaches? ...
I would like some practical guidance on when I should use a Domain Specific Language. I have found resources about advantages and disadvantages, but what kind of project would warrant its use? It seems like there is a big investment in time to create and maintain a DSL, so in what application space would I get a productivity return on ...
I have an issue where a different number of man hours is being worked during each sprint. This is messing up my velocity. How do you account for new team members being added and people spending time working on other projects when planning for Scrum? ...
I'm trying to determine some of the markers that indicate a project of limited resources. In my experience a project becomes a ‘limited resources’ project because someone was desperate to sell a solution to a client. The results is a tight budget, features are culled and SDLC processes are cut to a minimum. These short-cuts are taken so...
My company is following a bunch of clients and one of them has a terrible legacy website from another century. We did some updates on it and we are in charge on maintaining it even if we didn't created the website in the first place. Code sample? <TABLE bottommargin="0" topmargin="0" rightmargin="0"><tr><td><br><br><table> <tr valign="...
What questions would you ask a candidate applying for a software project or development manager position? Please could you submit one question per answer (with multiple answer if necessary) or a sequence of related questions. This way eventually all questions will get ordered by how good we all think they are. Please also provide a sho...
i am looking for a project planning tool that include features like a organizer, todo list, target * deadlines of projects. since i am a developer, it will be good to have a tool that can also do modelling like UML/ERD etc. i am also looking for something that can do note taking. something like a blog with code snipplets - so with sy...
I realize that the phrase "good practices" is a bit dubious and overused, but I think it applies to my question. I have some good web development experience, but I would like to hear what are some good basic practices when doing freelance work vis-à-vis project management. For example, I have the target domain, mydomain.com. Should I d...
What is the least offensive way to confront a programmer about an estimate they've provided? Even considering that some programmers consistently under or over estimate, sometimes an estimate is far off from what you would ever imagine it to be (one of those... you're kidding me moments). How do you confront them without putting them on...
Hi, Every time I try to find out a variable or string or some text in my codes (in project folder), I am in trouble. It seems I don't know easy techniques to do that. I was wondering if there is any tool which indexes a specified folder (in my case project folder) and updates in real-time (with updating codes). Also any string can be se...