Project Management for Software Development
Tutorials and tools for managing, estimating, planning and tracking software development projects: PMP, Agile, Scrum, Lean, Kanban
Not everyone is a fan of the self directed self organizing team. It flies in the face of traditional project management, and often conflicts with the traditional organization model. The benefits of self directed teams however are too big to ignore and now we have scientific proof as to why.
This short article provides an approach to adapt the Scrum concept of velocity to traditional project teams that are working without using the sprints/iterations of Agile project frameworks. In Scrum, velocity is how much product backlog effort a team can handle in one sprint.
Inspired by the Gang of Four patterns for object oriented software development, Michael Duell proposes in this article some patterns for dysfunctional project management behavior. He classifies them in the cremational, destructural and misbehavioral patterns categories.
In this blog post, Jim Bird discusses the issues of estimating in software development. He starts by reminding some of the modern lean concepts that condemn estimation. For him, this is applied mainly in context where delivering is more important than predictability.
Agile principles begin with the notion of creating valuable software, but fail to explain what that term means. Value is not defined by process or output, but rather results for the customer and the business. Every member of the agile team should feel like an owner of the term “valuable”.
The article “Familiar Metric Management – Small is Beautiful Once Again” (PDF) by Lawrence H. Putnam and Ware Myers discusses the fact that in software development projects, small teams are more efficient than larger one. They provides metrics showing that the concept of using small teams in software development is...
In the article “Why You Should Not Estimate in Hours or Days“, author Stephen Walther discusses the apparent conflict between developers that don’t like to provide estimates and managemers that need project management estimates because they want to know how many resources they need to allocate to a project and...
In this article, Chia Wei Cheng discusses the common controversies about story points and task hours during Scrum sprint planning. He defines story point as a high-level estimation of complexity made before sprint planning. On the other hand, he wrote that “the task-hour estimation is a low-level estimation made to...