Imagine you’re a fly on the wall in a readiness review meeting—a meeting of the project and senior managers to see if the product is ready to release. Senior manager: “Where are we with the testing?” Test manager: “Oh, here’s the defect data and the test data and…” Senior manager: “No, tell me where we […]
I’m sure you’ve heard conversations like this: Senior Manager: “Candace, I know you said you needed twelve weeks to test this release, but we’re really in a jam. I need you to release sooner. What can you do for me in six weeks?” As much as you might like to say, “Um, not much,” that’s
Your CIO has two projects he wants finished in the next month. “We can share this project manager and that test team on both of these high-priority projects,” he declares confidently. “The projects are small enough that the teams should be able to make progress.” Two weeks later, the CIO realizes neither project is progressing
Originally published in Computerworld. Drake, a technical contributor in your group, sends you his weekly status report. He’s been reporting on this six-week task for the past six weeks: Week 1: Task 1 90% done Week 2: Task 1 95% done Week 3: Task 1 96% done Week 4: Task 1 99% done Week 5:
© 2004 Johanna Rothman. This article was originally published in Better Software, February 2004. Scenario You have one open position to fill—two outstanding candidates. What do you do? Both candidates performed well in the interview and on a technical audition. You used behavior-description questions to understand what each candidate has accomplished professionally, and consensus decision-making to
Meet Wendy, a new CTO. She was hired to make the company’s flagship product, BigProduct, releaseable more frequently. In fact, her predecessor was fired due to his “inability to release product quickly enough.” Wendy’s been able to deliver products in adverse circumstances, so she feels she’s ready for the challenge. Wendy meets with her senior
© 2004 Johanna Rothman. This article was originally published in Better Software, January 2004. “We have world-class developers, but our testers are second class.” I hate hearing that. Too often, it’s true—and it’s not the testers’ fault. How did things get this way? I’ve been in the software industry for over twenty-five years. I can remember
© 2004 Johanna Rothman. Hiring technical managers is different — and more difficult — than hiring technical people. When I hire a technical person, such as a developer, I look for design, implementation and debugging abilities as part of the candidate’s technical skill set. But when I hire managers, the rules are different. Technical managers
© 2003 Johanna Rothman. This article was originally published in Crosstalk, Dec 2003. This article is the outgrowth of my original talk/article, Successful Engineering Management: 7 Lessons Learned Successful managers realize that they need to balance the needs of the business, the employees, and the work environment to be effective. In this article, the author
A Project Manager Described his Recent Agile Project in this Way: Agile practices helped us know where we were the whole way through the project, but we had a side benefit I hadn’t anticipated. The testers drove the project. In every other project I’ve managed, the testers were downtrodden, always complaining about the time they