I'd like to experiment with burn-down and planning game with the team I'm on. People on my team are interested in making it happen, however I'm sure someone has done this before and has learned some lessons we hopefully don't have to repeat. Does anyone know of an example Excel (or other tool) template available for burn-down or planni...
What code review policy you could recommend as the best for project you're managing? ...
My biggest concern is ease of use, and nothing beats a google spreadsheet or document (Except maybe Office). At some point, the free-form nature of the formats starts to cause a problem. Specifically, I have the same conceptual data split up between two documents. This is done because both provide useful views of the data. (Note that th...
Working with software day-to-day usually means you have to juggle project work, meetings, calls and other interrupts. What single technique, trick, or tool do you find most useful in managing your time? How do you stay focused? What is your single biggest distraction from your work? ...
I've come across a few different applications that monitor my usage while on the computer, but what have you used, and like? whether it be writing down your activities in a composition notbook or install an app that reports silently to a server? what do you like? ...
Multi-tasking is shown to be at least 15% less productive than dedicating people to a project (from Mythical Man Month), however in some cases it seems unavoidable. Part of the agile way is to build trust with your customer/team by delivering on time and rarely blowing your iteration schedules. This is difficult when multiple project...
Under what circumstances - if any - does adding programmers to a team actually speed development of an already late project? ...
I work in a team that was decent until about 3 months ago when a senior programmer, colleague of mine, was officially appointed "tech lead". He is a great programmer but he basically sucks at leading. We all respect him and think he would be great as an architect or something along that line but he needs a lot more of "something" to be ...
If a top-tier engineer (e.g. a founder of this site) offered to come be your unpaid intern for two weeks, would you hire him/her, or would it be a waste of everybody's time? If you were to hire him/her, what would you have them do? ...
We have a series of closed source applications and libraries, for which we think it would make sense opening up the source code. What has been blocking us, so far, is the effort needed to clean up the code base and documenting the source before opening up. We want to open up the source only if we have a reasonable chance of the project...
I'm looking for a free/open source collaborative project manager that can be deployed internally in my workplace that would act similar to Codeplex or Sourceforge. Does anyone know of something like this, and if so do you have experience with it. Requirements: Open Source or Free Locally Deployable Has the same types of features found...
If one were to use TiddlyWiki as a personal database for notes and code snippets, how would you go about keeping it in sync between multiple machines. Would a svn/cvs etc work. How would you handle merges? ...
In my programming life I work with the principle "K.I.S.S." - keep it simple stupid. This works out pretty well for me although the projects and tasks get even more complicated (at least for me in my project life). Do you use this principle? Why? Why not? Do you prosper from kiss or do you think this is impossible? ...
Team building, in my opinion, is often misunderstood concept! The wikipedia definition is also very theoretical. But i think it is real critical skill for any team leader. So, How do you "team-build"? Do you just book some conference room in a big hotel and discuss the same things you do at your regular meetings? Or you do you tak...
Hi, I'd be leading a new project soon. And I've been pondering over what are the basic infrastructure for a software project. These are the stuff that I think every project should have: -Coding style conventions -Naming conventions -Standard project directory structure(eg maven standard dir layout, etc) -Project management and issue...
I are working in a small development team of 4 people. We are trying develop "Agile style" - story points, small tasks, etc... Unfortunately, we are currently managing our tasks in a (shared) excel table. We looked at some available tools (Mingle, TFS, Scrum for Team System), but all of these looked like they would be too much overhead ...
I´m starting a small business that will handle code from some companies (the famous outsourcing business). Right now, I´ve studied a little of ITIL and PMBOK, within it i found lots of details and practices about project management, but I´m afraid in taking them too serious. ...
I just had a discussion with an employee of mine about the department programming language standard. He felt that the choice of the programming language should reside with the project team. I feel that management should have the overall decision on what language is used. If two languages fit the project criteria should the team's desire ...
I started on a password database (think KeePass) in Pascal when I was 13. I was so busy with making a functional text user interface (similar to Borland Pascal 7.0), that I didn't get to encrypting the password file. I was just replacing each character in a CSV (not really knowing it was called that) with its ASCII value. Needless to say...
What's the most often used reason for not being able to do agile, and is there an argument against it? ...