© (2000) Johanna Rothman and 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 Johanna […]
© 2000 Johanna Rothman. Abstract Many of us would like a precise answer to the question: “What’s the correct staffing ratio for developers to testers in my product development organization?” Usually though, the only answer is “It depends”. Your answer depends on your situation: the kind of project you’re working on, your schedule constraints, the
© 2000 Johanna Rothman. Abstract Process improvement projects can be difficult to start, keep on track, and assess results. We can use the same requirements gathering and specification techniques that we use on product-projects on our process improvement projects. This paper discusses how to define requirements for process improvement projects and how to use reviews
by Johanna Rothman. Originally published in Cutter’s Business-IT Alignment E-Mail Advisor, December 8, 1999. I was recently with a client that was having trouble completing its high-level design spec for a key internal system. The spec the designer delivered was 50 pages of dense text in a small type size. The sponsor refused to read
by Johanna Rothman. This article was originally published in Software Devleopment Magazine, December 1999. I’ve had great managers, and I’ve had lousy managers. The great managers always seemed to be pushing forward, solving problems and thinking about better ways to do things. The lousy managers repeated their mistakes on project after project; they claimed to
Abstract You’ve written the job description. You know just what you want in this employee. You have one tiny problem—you just can’t find that person. Now what? Sometimes you can continue to wait for the right person to come along. Sometimes you choose to hire someone with inadequate skills. In either case, you don’t have
Last week, we talked about avoiding dead projects. Now it’s time to talk about the hardest project category: the political project. Killing political projects is difficult, because it’s not a rational problem. Rational discussions are useless and don’t work. You can bring out metrics or try to discuss project-related issues, but nothing will work because
by Johanna Rothman. Originally published in Cutter’s Business-IT Alignment E-Mail Advisor, October 6, 1999. I visit many different organizations over the course of the year. As I begin working with a client, inevitably someone whispers to me, “Can you help kill my project?” I don’t normally kill projects, but some folks are so desperate to
© 1999 Johanna Rothman. This article was originally published in Crosstalk, October 1999. Organizations struggle [1] with their process improvement efforts for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most common struggle pattern is to take a long time developing a general understanding of their processes and then trying to define all possible alternatives in the
by Johanna Rothman. Originally published in Cutter’s Business-IT Alignment E-Mail Advisor, July 7, 1999. “There is nothing permanent except change.” — Heracleitus As our industry has changed from mainframes to client-server to distributed systems and the Web, the tools we use to develop and test our software have changed. How do we keep our staff