We have MS Sharepoint -- which isn't all bad for managing a task list. The data's publicly available, people are notified of changes and assignments. I think that Bugzilla might be a little easier for management and reporting purposes. While there are some nice Open Source Scrum management tools, I've used up a lot of my political c...
I'm not talking about the kind you get in college, but rather implementing progress reports on the Job for developers. My thoughts in organizing a development team is encouraging and, to some extend, requiring regular progress updates were developers would report on what they did in the last hour or few hours and how long tasks took. Be...
I work at a small company and we have 2 (possibly 3) developers (myself being one). Although our assignments don't often overlap, I do see that we occasionally write similar, if not the same code. There is also an atmosphere of competition that I think can drive us to write better code, but is dangerous because it sometimes forces one (o...
I'm the leader of a small web development team, and I have a feeling that we will have a couple telecommuters joining the team pretty soon (either new employees, or existing employees that will begin telecommuting). Any idea how to effectively manage and collaborate with developers working remotely? Most of the work we do is client-dri...
Looking for input from all, though mostly interested in small engineering teams / small companies (10 - 20 people) that develop web applications: Who is responsible for the overall look and feel of your UI (i.e. setting standards)? Is this person a dedicated resource or does he / she have other responsibilities? What type of backgrou...
I am yet to see one of those "Exceptional Project Management" moments in my career as a developer. I know there wont be one straight answer,but Here is my question: How do you spot such a thing? (I worked in many projects where project managers were just monitoring the health of a project, more of status reporting kind of thing.Please ...
Most importantly, why did it fail? What I'm looking for here is pathologies that anyone, whether new to the team or just waking up one day,can spot. ...
I would like to know your experience when you need to take over somebody else's software project - more so when the original software developer has already resigned. ...
Hi, Im looking for a free/open source bug tracking tool that doesn't require a database. Any Recommendations? Thanks in advance. RWendi ...
Our company is engaging an external Systems Integrator to develop its new mission critical system. I was hoping to compile the likely reasons it will fail so that we can anticipate these and safe guard against them. ...
In the past I've worked with several types of project managers. There's the laissez-faire PM who stays ignorant of the process as long as milestones are hit. There's the hands on PM who gets into the innards of the process and tries to block and tackle, removing obstacles. And then there's the micromanager. I've had a horrible succ...
How to deal with the developers refusing to use certain technologies or tools? Note: Good help is hard to find, so answer 'Let them go' doesn't work in this case. Besides, they are very good in what they do, just don't want to do what they don't want to do. Examples: "Get away from me with this Crystal Reports stuff or you will never ...
As a contractor, out-sourcer and shareware author,I have about 5-10 projects going on at any one time. Each project has a todo list, requirements need to be communicated to other outsources and employees, status needs to be given to clients, and developer's questions need to be answered. Sometimes it is too much... but then I realize th...
As software developers we create lots of... well... code. Much of the code we produce can go towards a new feature or an enhancement to an existing feature. When this is the case, how do we know when this feature is done? What does done mean in the context of a feature? For example, to Company A this may mean many different things like...
I'm a s/w developer in a small internal IT department within a financial firm and have worked on a number of small-medium sized projects that have had little or no project management throughout. This seems to always result in scope creep and therefore not meeting deadlines and having to sacrifice good design/code to satisfy users/manage...
As a developer I often release different versions of applications that I want tested by users to identify bugs and to confirm requirements are being met. I give the users a rough idea of what I have changed or new features that need testing, but this seems a bit slap-dash and not very well strucutured. I'd like to know what approaches ...
I'm a lone developer at the moment; please share you experiences on what is a good VC setup for a lone developer. My constraints are; I work on multiple machines and need to keep them synced up Sometimes I work offline I'm currently using Subversion(just the client to a remote server), and that is working ok. I'm interested in ...
One of our developers is continually writing code and putting it into version control without testing it. The quality of our code is suffering as a result. Besides getting rid of the developer, how can I solve this problem? EDIT I have talked to him about it number of times and even given him written warning ...
What practically useful tips, tools, techniques, and general advise could you give to those development managers and contractors that are willing to make sure that the quality component of classic "budget, time, scope, quality equation" gets addressed appropriately as part of the initial project plan? For instance, setting aside some bu...
I've worked on a few projects managed through the use of a Gantt chart. Some of these have has a massive number of tasks and the project manager spends all their time wrestling with MS Project instead of making good choices. I can see the point if there are a number of separate teams working towards something (e.g. legal, IT, marketing...