A client was optimizing for what they thought was the bottleneck in their software development: the testers. In the assessment, I gathered some quantitative data about how long the testers took to test and how long it took for the other groups to perform their work. (They used a phased lifecycle.) The testers were […]
David Anderson has an intriguing post, Lawyers, Unit Tests and Performance Reviews. David says “Individual team members can be set specific goals and behavior objectives…” and gives examples. I prefer that team members set their own goals with input from their managers. But the key here is that a technical person should be looking to
Hal posted his take on creating faster cheaper projects. (See Creating Faster Cheaper Projects.) I see that I did not make my assumptions clear in my original post. Hal had three problems (at least!) with my post: Fewer people increase the length of the project. The longer the project, the more the requirements will change
In the last few weeks, I’ve received several questions about how to assess the productivity and effectiveness of testers. I’m concerned about this, because a tester’s effectiveness doesn’t just depend on the quality of the tester’s work, it depends on the quality of the work product the tester tests (as well as the schedule
In addition to Frank Patrick’s excellent post of the Top 10 Sources of Project Failure, I have one more: No project manager. In the past week, I’ve received inquiries from people, asking how they can successfully complete projects or programs without project or program managers. I tell them I don’t know how to do that.
In Measuring Productivity #3: Possible Measurements, I made an off-hand comment, “The zeroth measure of productivity is showing up.” I now think showing up is necessary, but not sufficient. I’ve been thinking about what each of us produces individually, and thinking of ways to understand and possibly measure it: How many hours per day do you
The zeroth measure of productivity is showing up. Sorry I haven’t been showing up, but I have to admit, sleeping is good 🙂 Ok, back to business. When I tried to calculate productivity of a team, here’s what I measured for one team over the course of five releases (Apologies to bloglet subscribers; tables
When we think about manufacturing work, we measure labor productivity as the ratio of the output of goods and services to the labor hours devoted to the production of that output, output per hour. (See U.S. Dept of Labor) Remember the discussion of Project Constraints and Requirements? That’s where I said the project requirements were
In my travels last week, I contracted a cold. And of course, life doesn’t stop just because I have a cold and my brain doesn’t work. I still have writing, phone calls, consulting, and driving to manage. I managed to ask for help with the writing. As soon as anyone heard me on the phone,
I use the CMM in my work. The CMM/CMMI is a wonderful collection of key process areas. Every product development environment can use many of the key process areas to improve their work. The keyword in that sentence is *many*, not all. When companies aim for a particular level of the CMM/CMMI, they do