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Johanna’s Books
Monthly Archives: April 2003
Measure in the Middle
I ended up in the hospital last weekend (facial cellulitis – yuck). On my floor, we had people who were not too sick, who needed a few days to recover from an acute problem. Everyone’s prognosis was good, and … Continue reading
Deciding When to Outsource
I had dinner last night with a CIO who’s working on outsourcing a significant part of his development and testing. He suggested that any senior manager who’s not thinking about outsourcing and how to make it work is missing … Continue reading
Describe Project Tradeoffs: Project Constraints and Project Requirements
When I teach and discuss project management issues, I talk about project constraints and project requirements. Most people immediately think of the “iron triangle”: cost, schedule, and quality. But I don’t find that the iron triangle is sufficient when … Continue reading
Why Create Tension Between Development and Test?
I think of development and test as partners. The developers create product and defects. The testers detect product and defects. They both need to understand what the product is supposed to be and how it’s supposed to work (the … Continue reading
Hone Your Listening Skills
In a recent blog post and comment, Hal Macomber said, “Listening is one of the foundational skills of project managers. Without a high level of competence at listenting projects are doomed to drift. Given the general characterization by wives … Continue reading
Managing Multi-Tasking
After my presentation last night at the Detroit PMI chapter, an attendee asked me, “Is context switching really as bad as you say it is?” Yes, it is. I believe Weinberg’s estimate of losing 10-20% of possible work-time every … Continue reading
Time to Learn More
Via Steve Norrie’s weblog, I found Kovitz’s “Hidden Skills that Support Phased and Agile Requirements Engineering”. In phased development, projects promise large feature sets to a customer for future delivery. In agile projects, the requirements are refined over numerous little … Continue reading
Making Iterations Work for You
On the AYE conference wiki, Jerry Weinberg said this: “no iteration should be so big that you can’t afford to throw it away if it doesn’t come out right in the end.” The longer the iteration, the less likely … Continue reading
Defect or a Feature — Choose your user requirements
Bloglet subscribers saw two posts from me Friday. They saw the post I published *and* the post I saved as a draft. Surprised me. Since I know about this feature, I’ll work around it, and compose future drafts somewhere … Continue reading
Creating Silos Helps Managers Avoid Seeing the Data
In Sunday’s Boston Globe View from the Cube column, Lisa Liberty Becker claims “Telling the truth can be hazardous to your job”. She goes on to talk about her husband, a performance test engineer, whose manager buried his reports, … Continue reading
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