In general, technical people don’t seem to make great managers (unless they’ve been trying to become great). A result of that is what Reifer says in his IEEE Software (May/June 2004) column Catching the Brass Ring: “software professionals aren’t often tapped for top corporate leadership positions.” He goes on to say “executives of my […]
I now have a new hard drive. And I’m back from vacation. Thanks to the folks at MacResQ, I didn’t lose any data at all. (Truly amazing with a broken hard drive. If you need a chuckle, read commute mathematics. When I travel, I catch up on my magazine and journal reading. A nice side-effect
I’ve been trying to boot my computer for the last 3 hours. It’s not clear when I’ll fix the hard drive. No posts and no emails until I do…
Not all projects should be done. Some projects don’t even rate discussion. But sometimes it’s a lot harder to tell when a project is worthy and should be considered. Here are some questions I ask when trying to evaluate when a project is worthwhile: What business need does this project fill? (Does the organization
If you haven’t read the comments starting from here from the previous posts, please do. Effern blew the whistle — so very nicely — when he perceived I hadn’t considered enough options. It’s possible I didn’t consider enough options:-) (Maybe I didn’t develop three or more worthy alternatives.) What Effern did, oh so graciously,
I’m in conversation with a client about a possible project. The Big Guy wanted to meet with me immediately, but had constrained time, so I shifted my schedule and met with him. It was clear from our conversation that he didn’t quite know what he wanted, but he did want a proposal from me.
One of the questions I ask project teams is how they know what to do when. Most of the time, the developers look at me as if I’ve grown two heads and say, “Well, we look at the requirements. We do the high ones first, the medium ones next, and the low ones if we
We’re getting ready for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, and my sister decided a scrapbook of family pictures would be a great present. She’s right, it will be wonderful. Mark and I were looking for pictures of us and our children, so we pulled out all of the pictures from the last 20 years. We
Some of my suggestions for people in my classes are simply to buy some good books for some specific information. When I suggest this, I sometimes hear “my manager won’t let me buy books.” As a bibliophile, I can’t understand that :-). Even though I do accept that not everyone is like me, you
In the last few weeks, several people have asked me how much rework is normal. Well, if you’re working in a test-driven development environment, you probably have very little rework. My estimates for the few real test-driven projects I’ve seen is that they spend about 10-15% of their time on rework (finding problems and