If you have to make yourself a New Year’s resolution, resolve to be a Passionate Programmer (or a passionate whatever-you-are). Chad Fowler wrote a delightful book, The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development. What Chad doesn’t realize is that you don’t have to be a programmer to read this book. You can
A new article is up, Using the Project Portfolio to Move to Incremental Project Funding. It’s up on PMBoulevard.com. (Free registration required). Enjoy!
On mailing lists, when I speak, in email, people ask, “When did ‘some principle, approach, or whatever’ start?” A long time ago. Timeboxes have been around forever. I’m pretty sure that when the Pharoahs told their architects to build a pyramid, they said, “And do it by this-date! Or else!” I know that military projects
I have fixed the how-do-I-get-up-in-the-morning-when-Mark-is-traveling problem. I bought a new Sangean RCR-5 Digital AM/FM Clock Radio with a Sangean Pillow Speaker – #PS-100 – D/S (I love them both) and now, I hear the alarm, no matter what side I sleep on! I don’t have the problem of blasting my good ear with noise that
A client recently asked me how many people should be on his agile team. “I have a two-person project here, and a 23-person project there. Do I want two teams, one of 2 and one of 23? Oh, and how many testers do I really need?” I can believe there’s a small and short project
I’ve been working with several management teams recently. They realize they need to change how they are organized in order to really make the agile teams even more productive. For example, what good is a functional manager? If functional managers don’t need to assign tasks and check on how the work is going (the team
I finally heard about the almost-complete financial numbers from the Agile 2009 conference. The conference is supposed to generate enough monies for the Agile Alliance to fund research, other conferences, guest speakers, and a whole bunch of other initiatives that are on the site. I was happy, because early indications are that we did. No,
I receive a number of please-link-to-me requests each week. Some are for products, some are for random sites. I received one a couple of weeks ago and decided not to respond because I wasn’t going to accept the link request. I received another request, this time with a please respond with an “aye or nay”.
Dave and Bob have great comments on my post, Might Three Backlogs Be Better Than One?. Dave is describing situations where management is making reasonable decisions, not incurring management debt, and by extension, technical debt. Bob and I have experience with significant management debt. (Take a look at Musings About Management Debt for more information
I’ve been working with several clients on their transition to agile approaches to their projects. They all have a common state: Many features to implement Huge technical debt Many defects They want to get a handle on all the work they have to do. I suggested they consider three backlogs, making sure that for a