This is a serious question... take a moment and think about what happened to your last unsuccessful project. The list is usually contains the same 'usual suspects'.
Bad requirements. Moving targets. Crazy estimates. Unrealistic deadlines.
On Monday I spoke at this year's Academy for Software Engineering Educators and Trainers and got to spend some time talking with Watts Humphrey. He asked me this question.
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Noted RedMonk industry analyst Michael Cote did a webcast interview with me about the 6th Sense Analytics product suite and how we integrate with the JIRA feature/issue tracker software. We’re a very nice addition to your Jira install. We easily pull data out of JIRA and then provide additional reporting and trending features.
What's the best way to use tools like continuous integration or 6th Sensor Analytics? Should we see a problem and hit developers over the head? Scream and run around? Or force developers to follow a rigid set of steps to "guarantee" success? (Herd those cats!)
Much of Agile is about being flexible. It's about getting feedback and adjusting your daily practices to match. This is why so many people have rejected the idea of universal best practices completely.
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For this interview we've got Ken Pugh talking about what he thinks you should be doing over the next year and his favorite career tip. Ken's video is a bit shorter than the Scott Davis post, but he's got some interesting insights on becoming a domain expert.
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This is the first post in a series of video interviews with software development industry notables.
I recently had a chance to sit down with Scott Davis and discuss where he sees our industry going this year. He also has some sound advice for any ambitious developer planning their next career move. And for those of you that don’t know Scott, he is a fellow No Fluff, Just Stuff speaker and author of several books including Groovy Recipes and GIS for Web Developers.
Our most popular chart is our burn up. It's a great way to get a handle on several facets of your project at a glance. I like the way Allister Cockburn describes them in this article.
Burn charts have become a favorite way to give visibility into a project's progress. They are extremely simple and astonishingly powerful. They reveal the strategy being used, show the progress made against predictions, and open the door to discussions about how best to proceed, including the difficult discussions about whether to cut scope or extend the schedule. They have a natural mapping to the earned value charts used in military/government projects. They should part of your standard bag of tricks for project planning and reporting.
Introducing change to an organization can be difficult and there are dozens of things that can go wrong. John Maxwell's great book 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership has a set of steps that I've found very helpful.
David Starr had a good post this week on planning future work cycles. Do you use a team's commitment to the next iteration or the team's historical performance?
You’ve installed the 6th Sense Analytics toolset and discovered that your most senior developers are spending less than an hour a day writing code. This concerns you since you know these guys love coding and left their last job when they got pushed out of code.
The 6th Sense development team created a private blog to discuss development problems and solutions. We've decided to open that blog up to the world. It's small at the moment... just a few posts on Grails and Hibernate, but it'll grow.
6SA Development at Blogspot.com
Come check us out!
