Project Management for Software Development
Tutorials and tools for managing, estimating, planning and tracking software development projects: PMP, Agile, Scrum, Lean, Kanban
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, Steve Andrews discusses the usage of team velocity to plan the next Scrum sprints and how can we use it to make more informed management decisions. Using a quantitative management approach and Agile methods allows us to actually measure the impact of management decisions on the...
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...
The famous Tom de Marco shares in the article “All Late Projects Are the Same” some experience of his 50th year working in information technology. He thought initially all late projects were the same in that they were really estimation failures, not performance failures. Now he thinks that all projects...
This article explains how, given the current global economic climate, many IT organizations’ frozen budgets and cost-cutting drive down value-adding and innovative IT initiatives. It describes how Lean principles can help to institutionalize IT Demand Management processes in the correct manner so that it reduces investment risk, optimizes resource utilization...
One of the most common myths is to believe that being “Agile” means avoiding planning. This myth couldn’t be further from the truth and people use it as a way to avoid agile practices. Agile planning does not mean “no planning” but rather a flexible plan that changes with the...
Uncertainty in project management cannot be eliminated by any estimation methods. It arises partly because of imperfect knowledge of what to do and how long it should take, and partly because of unpredictable events. This article discusses uncertainty in project management: why it exists, how it behaves, how it accumulates,...
This article presents three ways to predict schedules based on historical data with some amount of rigor. Evidence-based project management is a technique that allows you to generate predictions for a release based on historical data—not estimates, but predictions.