This is a situation that everyone has to deal with on a regular basis simply due to the nature of work. (Typically, if you know everything you need to know to complete a job, you’ve already completed the job and don’t need to do it again. 🙂 ) Be honest with your boss about your … Read more
Deadlines are part of a fundamentally wrong idea about how to do software development. People new to, or outside of, the software development industry do not understand this: Software is done when it is done, no sooner and no later. If a developer has a task and a week to do it, and it looks … Read more
I work in government. We recently ran a software development procurement process and selected three vendors to work on an Agile project. Some notes: We were already 75% sure we wanted to run an Agile project because we knew our requirements were ambiguous and because it was a public-facing web project with a significant design … Read more
It is still as true today as the day it was written. This is because it is fundamentally about communication between people working on the same project, and none of the advances of the past 30 years have substantially changed that. Of course, we have learned a lot in those 30 years, but all improvements … Read more
You might want to think of your story as a vertical slice of the system. A story may (and often will) touch components in all of the architectural layers of the system. You might therefore want to think of your tasks as the work needed to be done on each of the components that your … Read more
Here’s the fundamental question. When will the client think they’re done? If they think they’ll be done by June, then you put an Agile team in place. That’s 4-6 people for 6 months. That’s the budget. Essentially, you do the multiplication for them. team * rate * 6 months. If they think they’ll be mostly … Read more
I would favour Trac. I’ve used Trac a long time over 7 years by now. I’ve also worked 3 years with Redmine. Latest versions I used in production were: Trac 1.0.1 and Redmine 2.2.3. But Redmine has some serious drawbacks over Trac: Installation is not easy: You cannot use Debian/Ubuntu package system for production use … Read more
Taiga is 100% free and has all the features that comes with something like JIRA. http://taiga.io/ It even has a burn-down chart! So that’s a win! Here’s a site with a nice overview of what Taiga integrates with and real developer opinions on the tool. http://stackshare.io/taiga
On general tips; We are implementing a process of 1) Business Requirements Statement (BRS) 2) Functional Specification 3) Technical specification The BRS covers what the business problems are, and what the requirements are around solutions, testing, security, reliability and delivery. This defines what would make a successful solution. The functional spec details what is needed, … Read more
Hofstadter’s Law: Any computing project will take twice as long as you think it will — even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.