So far, I’ve addressed how a project charter can help a team start a project fast and well. That’s why the project charter must clarify product vision, the various project risks, and product risks. And, it’s equally important to know what done means. If the team does not know how little they can do to […]
Want to make sure you complete your project as early as possible? Define release criteria. Release criteria are the few critically important objective criteria that define what “done” means for your project. Sometimes, it’s a combination of date, defects, and feature completion. Sometimes it’s just the date. The formula for defining release criteria is: Define
© 2002 Johanna Rothman. This article was originally publised in STQE Magazine, March/April 2002. How to know if your software is ready to release For any project, the big question is “Is the software ready to release yet?” Or more specifically, “When is the development and testing part of the project done?” You can’t know if you’re
© 2000 Johanna Rothman. The push to web-ify your business can feel overwhelming, especially when senior management is already demanding to know whether it is ready and when it will be released. If your organization is struggling and does not want to review all of the requirements in detail to get a project moving, you
©1999 Johanna Rothman “Ship it!” Do you say these words with a feeling of pride? Or a feeling of desperation? For any project, the big question is “when will the project be ready to ship?” When is the project complete? You can’t know when the project is ready, unless you know what “complete” means. I
by Johanna Rothman. © 1998 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the
You’ve got interdependencies across the organization for a given project or program to release a product. You can see demos. That’s not the problem. You need enough insight or prediction to start the marketing campaign or to create training videos or product documentation. You need some kind of milestone criteria so you know you can complete
In Part 1, I talked about small stories/chunks of work, checking in all the time so you could build often and see progress. That assumes you know what done means. Project “done” means release criteria. Here are some stories about how I started using release criteria. Back in the 70s, I worked in a small development group.
Would you like to release your product at any time? I like it when releases are a business decision, not a result of blood, sweat, and tears. It’s possible, and it might not be easy for you. Here are some stories that showed you how I did it, long ago and more recently. Story 1: Many years
Release trains, the technique of planning releases on a particular date several times a year (such as quarterly releases, on the 12th of the last month of the quarter), can help you manage your development and test staff as well as machines and tool resources. I wrote about release trains a while ago here.