A mere sub-standard screwdriver can turn a quick Do-It-Yourself job round the house into an exercise in frustration that makes you feel really exhausted, annoyed and helpless at the same time. This is a feeling that is just too familiar not only to anyone who ever attempted to use a bogus screwdriver but most software professionals who a...
I work in the technical department of a design agency. We use XP to manage our department's software development. I have been asked to give a short presentation describing Scrum and whether it would be suitable, in a broader context, for managing client project work. Scrum would be applied to cross functional teams containing graphic de...
I am wondering what is your experience with AxoSoft OnTime issues tracking and project management solution in case you have ever used it (pros and cons)... Cheers, B. ...
What are the main reasons personal projects (software apps etc) never get to the level of competing with your salary? To me one big problem is "on-the-fly" feature expansion, with this problem, the end only gets further and further away! ...
What are the best practices and rules-of-thumb to follow while maintaining code? Is it good practice to have only the production ready code in the development branch, or should untested latest code be available in the development branch? How do you guys maintain your development code and production code? Edit - Supplementary question ...
Say suppose 10 developers have taken 6 months to develop some application. As a project manager how much time should I spare in my plans for testing? 6 months of effort includes unit testing. I am specific about functional test and user acceptance test. Is there any ratio or relationship between development time and testing time? ...
Probably an easy one: Are there any rules of thumb or pointers that could help recognise political requirements? Let’s say one of stakeholders (your boss, a head of another department or an actual user) asks for a feature or particular characteristic of software being developed by yourself or your team. Is there a litmus test to determ...
Depending on the project, there are a number of artifacts that might be produced. On top of the number of documents, they also come in many formats (and some are produced in multiple formats). So how do you keep everything organized and up-to-date, especially in a project with a large amount of documentation? ...
We have a project coming up where the PM is insistent that the team should "eat their own dog food"? At what point is it realistic to do this? e.g. assume we have to write an editor. We can't use this editor at the beginning to actually code because it doesn't exist. We have to use another editor. For a while during the project, using...
I'm looking for a Delphi component that will allow end users to visually move, expand or shrink costs (or any resource, really) on a project plan. The plan would show the schedule horizontally month by month, or perhaps week by week, with each cost on its own line. eg. You might have Cost 1 which runs from Month 3 to Month 6, and Cost 2...
How to convey a bad news to the client? ...
I know they are supposed to assign tasks, monitor progress and plan. But apart from monitoring, all else is a one time activity either at the beginning, middle or end of the project. So what do they do on a day to day basis? ...
What tips and "standards" do you use in your Redmine project management process? Do you have a standard wiki insert template you could share or a standard way to work a project using bugs features tasks and support issues? Do you let issues and updates get emailed into Redmine? Do you use the forums? Do you use SVN repository? Do you ...
http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/6986/Release-2-0-restricting-free-plans-giving-back-with-features-and-pric I'm very disappointed about this... I use Assembla for my personal projects(commercial) and now I have to move everything to another place! There are some questions about different free hosting... I extracte...
You must have heard the archetypical story of a failing/failed project: A team of inexperienced programmers work 24x7 Bugs are fixed only to introduce new bugs Customer is screaming that he could not even do the basic stuff (Saving/Querying) etc. Programmers used to having the spec handed down struggle to improvise No automated unit te...
Basically I need a hosted solution, where one can create an account for a project and the distributed team members can interact through that site during the project implementation. I know a lot of such software but not a hosted one. ...
Tommorrow is the deadline, boy did it come fast!!? It's twisted but some of us have procrastinated just a tad as the thrill of an all-nighter makes things sharp and real- it must be the adrenaline. But how do you keep your mind on the game as the hours slip away and your eyes burn and squint? Do you eat lots of candy? Gulp cup after bi...
I realize that there have been other questions about software project management systems, and those are helpful, but does anyone know of good systems that also integrate with sharepoint? Ideally, I'd like to see something just like Trac with SVN backend support, but integrated into Sharepoint. ...
i am currently involved in two projects. Both projects I am working on have quite a number of tasks which I think are critical. I did highlight to both project managers that I may not be able to handle the workload and I requested backup - but in the end they only did some shifting back of the work schedule. How would you prioritize you...
Currently I use the "One Page Project Manager" Excel Template for project status reports. It contains a summary of last week's work and a forecast for the next week. For all important tasks we track, if they are comleted or not. Everything on one page. I send this report every week to all participants/stakeholders. (hint: I do not work i...