Project Management for Software Development

10 Deadly Sins of Software Estimation

Steve McConnell presents 10 of the worst ways estimates go wrong and provides time-tested rules of thumb for dramatically improving estimation accuracy. The average project overruns its planned budget and schedule by 50%-80%. In practice, little work is done that could truly be called “estimation.” Many projects are scheduled using...

Wrong Start for Scrum

In this blog post, Johanna Rothman shows some of the common problem of teams that think they start using Scrum but stick to traditional project management planning. Some of the smells of this situation could be the fact that the ScrumMaster keep preparing Gantt charts for the iteration or that...

Retrospective Velocity

In this article, Brian Tarbox and Heather Mardis try to answer the classical question: “how long is this going to take?” They discuss the notion of velocity in Scrum and how to use it to estimate future sprints. But not all projects use the Scrum framework and people rarely record...

Agile Project Manager Should Keep the PMBOK

In this article, Robert Galen argues that traditional project managers DO need to reframe themselves and their approaches in an agile context. They must become context-based and situational in your approaches. However, “traditional” principles and techniques from the PMBOK shouldn’t be “thrown away” in agile projects.

Agile and Lean Six Sigma

This video shares the agile adoption experience that a Six Sigma Black Belt and an agile coach took borrowing concepts from Lean/Six Sigma to help promote and sustain the change that adoption to agile brought to the software development team. Are they opposing concepts or complementary?

Agile Dealing with Team and Customer

This article share some key points for project managers that are starting out on Agile projects. These key points are process knowledge and coaching, effective communication, work transparency, acceptance of change and continuous planning, encouragement of a self-managing team. He concludes that Agile processes usually succeed when a PM and...

Creating a Successful Open Source Project

Creating a successful open-source project involves far more than simply writing some code and putting it up on (GitHub|CodePlex|SourceForge|*). This talk will cover some of the basics of marketing an open-source project. It discusses what should be considered as “marketing” as well as give plenty of practical “how to” about...

The Manifesto for Poorly-Run Companies

Dave Moran shares with us a funny manifesto for poorly-run companies which is inspired by the famous Agile manifesto. He says that if the company actions and behaviors are not consistent with the company values, those values will be nothing more than hollow words to the employees at large. Enjoy…...