I’ve been at the STAR conference this week, and Cem Kaner’s keynote talk yesterday discussed the idea of extended random regression testing — take all your programmatic tests, and run them in random sequences for a long time. You’ll find defects you cannot find just running the tests by themselves. Here’s the logic behind this […]
I’m not a big fan of body-of-knowledge based certifications. Testing to someone to detect if they’ve learned the words in books is not adequate to determine actual skill on the job. (Note that there are skill-based certifications, generally from vendors, that appear to be quite useful at detecting if the person is capable of performing
I had a great time in Israel (taught an open-enrollment project management workshop plus a one-day tips and tricks as an onsite), and met up with Israeli bloggers. It was wonderful meeting people with whom I’d corresponded.Now that I’m back on the east coast and recovered from a little jet lag, I’ve been catching up
I’m off to Israel for a week, starting today. If you’d like to meet me for dinner Sunday night, 20:00, contact Roy Osherove. If Sunday doesn’t work for you, send me an email and maybe we can figure something else out. Back to regular blogging tomorrow…
Seth Godin is one sharp fella. He’s just published a new ebook, BullMarket: Companies That Can Help You Make Something Happen. I’m thrilled to be part of the Seth’s “unscientific listing blogs” section, along with Hal Macomber and Clarke Ching. I’m flattered to be part of BullMarket. And I recommend you read Free Prize
Based on yesterday’s comments, it’s past time for me to define what I mean when I talk about product management, product lifecycle management, lifecycle choices, and project management. Here goes: Product management: The activities that plan the product’s evolution from birth to obsolescence. In a product company, product managers perform these roles. In an IT
I’m not a fan of project scheduling tools. I have trouble making the tools create the schedule the way I think, and I can never quite see the whole schedule when it’s in electronic form. Other people, especially senior managers, tend to believe the project schedule once it’s in electronic form, no matter how
I’ve noticed a common theme among the projects in trouble I’ve encountered over the past few months: functional milestones without deliverable milestones as a part of the functional milestone. Here are examples of functional milestones: “requirements complete,” “code complete.” These milestones raise these questions for me: How can you know something is complete when
Now that I’m back from vacation, I’m catching up on my reading. I enjoyed David Anderson’s Management versus Leadership on ‘The Apprentice’ which prompted me to think about what I would have done in Kwame’s place. It took me a long time to learn, but a manager always has the option of firing people who
I publish a monthly (most of the time) email newsletter, The Pragmatic Manager. The last two issues have dealt with decreasing project time, before and during the project. Clearly, I don’t remember to post notices of the emails every month, so feel free to subscribe yourself.