I've been asked to join in with a project and there is no actual leader (it's not a business setting), worse still there are about 8 members and because of this, there is no actual action plan. I'd volunteer myself as the leader or manager but I don't have the time or inclination to do so, should I just watch it struggle (and possibly ne...
I have a billion potential ideas running through my head. About five of those I have actually started and have become "side projects" in addition to my "day job". Some are further along than others, and a few are even demonstrable. The problem I have is that one always takes attention away from the others. I don't want to give up any of ...
One of the elements of the Joel Test is that you have an up to date schedule. What tools do you use to create and maintain your project schedule? How often is it updated? ...
For me a multistage environment contains environments for development, testing, quality assurance, maybe a client review stage and finally production. It should allow easy collaboration between developers, project status tracking and easy deployment of the application to any stage for a specific version. You can propose specific tools ...
What tips to people have for getting hobby/home projects done? What tools do you use for designing & planning code? (Pen and paper, software, both?) Do you use software to plan and track your project? How do you choose libraries to use (e.g. to make yourself productive)? Are there any good books/sites on planning small projects? How do...
When you are working on hobby projects at home, how do you make yourself productive? Is it planning and self discipline? Do you make notes etc? Creating the right environment? Music? Silence? Good desk? PC set up? Taking the phone off the hook?! If you have a couple of hours and you want to get stuff done, what do you do to make the ...
If you are sending work/progress reports to the project lead on a daily or weekly basis, I wondered if you would consider using Twitter or similar services for this updates. Say if you're working remotly or with a distributed team and the project lead has a hard time getting an overview about the topics people are working and where the ...
Sure, we can use a simple bulleted list or a mindmap. But, there must be a better, more interactive way. What do you use when starting your website architecture? ...
When you are starting a personal programming project, what is your first step? I'm trying to start a project thats just an idea at the moment. I get lots of these and I dive right into the code and after a while just completely lose interest and or just forget about the project. When you are starting, what is your first step? do you pla...
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...
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...
What are the steps to estimating using function points? Is there a quick-reference guide of some sort out there? ...
What tools do you use to plan a project or a large feature set? I currently use a mix of Word for writing specs and Photoshop for mockups, but is there something more suited for developers? ...
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...
So you've just been put on the spot by The Boss. You've got 15 minutes to come up with a back of the envelope estimate for the addition of some new feature. Your boss (fortunately) recognizes that you can't provide an accurate estimate in that time so expecting something that is in the right order of magnitude. The question is how do yo...
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'm trying to teach myself how to use modern Persistence patterns (OR/M, Repository, etc) and development practices (TDD, etc). Because the best way (for me) to learn is by doing, I'd like to build some sort of demo application for myself. The problem is, I've got no idea what sort of application to build. I'd like to blog about my exper...
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...
We use code names to name branches and to have an easy way to reference the next version, before Marketing has decided what number or even name to give it when it is officially launched. I have used names of planets, moons and cities, since they offer an easy successive list to choose from, and have even used names of STDs in an attempt...