Project Management for Software Development
Tutorials and tools for managing, estimating, planning and tracking software development projects: PMP, Agile, Scrum, Lean, Kanban
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...
In this blog post, Bill Nichols discusses the fact that the engineering disciplines needed to apply agility to mission-critical software systems are not as well defined or practiced. His posts gets its title from a from book written by Barry Boehm and Richard Turner in 2003. He summarizes a talk...
In this article, Carlos Eduardo dos Santos Nunes shares some of his experience of situation where an Agile team has to cooperate with a Project Office (PMO). In some situations, you have to take into account the importance of project management, based on the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge)...
Corey Ladas wrote a classic essay on Scrum-ban where he discusses Scrum and Kanban hybrids. He presents the concept of index card and explains that Kanban is more than just a work request on a card and putting sticky notes on a whiteboard is not enough to implement a pull...
In this interesting blog post, Glen Alleman discusses the concept of competency models for project managers. He lists a set of elements that should be used to assess project managers in the following areas of competence: performance measurement, status reporting, organizational processes, team building, staff development, perspective, negotiation, risk management,...