I’m familiar with managing defects by severity (how bad the problem is for the user if the user encounters the problem), and by priority (what’s the business value of fixing this problem), but I had lunch yesterday with some folks who use frequency of occurrence to also manage defects. They started this because they
I’m on an around-the-world trip in March. I’m speaking at the Software Development conferences in Wellington on March 15, and in Sydney on March 17. Any bloggers interested in getting together for a dinner on March 15 or March 17? I’ll be in Perth for the weekend, and then travel on to Israel (Mar 23-31),
Caveat: I just started thinking about this, so I don’t feel particularly articulate. After reading Roy’s post of Kent Beck’s discussion “Invest in the design of the system every day”, I realized that’s what I do for project planning. Every day, I’ll adapt the work I’ve planned to do, to meet the needs of
I have several accounts with a credit card company: two cards and a merchant account. They don’t want the expense of printing monthly statements for the merchant account, so they sent me a letter to enroll my merchant account in online statements to avoid the paper charge. In my default browser (Safari), I attempt
I’m working with Esther this week on the book. We’re editing (and continuing to pair-write and pair-edit). Today, one of the things we addressed were the comments dealing with the people we name in the book. We hadn’t done a good job drawing our readers in to care about the people. So we’re fixing
A reader sent me email with this question: “We have a group of four people (3 developers and a tester). We work on 4 products, releasing one about once a month (each product is released once a quarter). The developers are devoted to one product when they’re developing, but have to fix problems immediately if
I just received this in email: Pledge Our company is completely and absolutely committed to quality. * * Except on time-critical projects and during adverse cash-flow situations. When else would you need to be committed to quality? (Not to zero defects, but to an appropriate level of quality for the product you’re trying to
I’m catching up with my blog reading, and discovered these two gems: Staying Awake has links to comparing the lack of sleep with too much alcohol. Since I’m a one-drink-one-drunk person (well, ok, not drunk, but certainly not sober), this one resonated with me. And via Steve Norrie’s blog, I discovered this oldie-but-goodie, Personal Chemistry
I’m excited to announce that Roy Osherove’s interview with me is now posted on IT Conversations. Here’s the link to the interview. Roy interviewed me about the hiring book, and of course we segued into project management and management issues. Enjoy!
In Greg’s provocative comment, he says, “The idea that contributor initiatives are a drag on an organization speaks more to the insecurity of the management than to its skills.” I’ve been noodling that comment since I received it. I agree with Greg that some managers are insecure enough to insist that they make all