Project Management for Software Development
Tutorials and tools for managing, estimating, planning and tracking software development projects: PMP, Agile, Scrum, Lean, Kanban
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.
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...
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...
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...
Historically, estimation methods have focused on effort at the team level. Recent agile software development practices have shed light on taking individuals – who are acting as part of a team—into consideration. A lot of software – mobile device apps, services, components – is now written by one-person teams, thus...
Estimation in software project management is often an issue. This blog post discusses some psychological aspects of estimating in software development. It explains the following effect that impact our estimation activity: The “halo” effect, framing effects, overconfidence, attribute Substitution, base-rate neglect and anchoring. It defines what they are and give...
Is there a relationship between the dependency of project tasks and the achievement of work close to the estimated date? This is the discussion that Assaf Stone carries in his blog post “Do Agile Estimation Techniques Really Account for Scrum Projects’ Successes?“. His conclusion is that a project with multi-dependent...