I’ve been thinking more about requirements. In the most recent two assessments I’ve done, both organizations have been stuck on thinking they could define their requirements before design and implementation. IWBNI (It Would Be Nice If) users could know their requirements early. For small projects (a couple of people, maybe a couple of months) …
If you haven’t read Joel Spolsky’s entry on office architecture stop and read that first. Finally, an office in which people can successfully work alone andwith other people — and who don’t have to worry about keeping their voices down. I’m amazed at the space per person (425 sq. ft if I understood). Most …
Earlier this week, I was at the Rational User Conference. I was part of a dynamic panel, “The People Factor: Experts Weigh In On The Soft Side of Software.” One question was about how technical managers or project managers have to be. Murray Cantor, one of the other panelists, summed it up this way: …
One of the most difficult problems in software development is knowing how to elicit and discuss requirements. It’s difficult because the people who are supposed to know the requirements don’t always have a clear idea of what they want. And, even people with tremendous communication and other soft skills don’t always have good ways …
I had a lovely dinner with Brian Marick and our spouses Saturday night. (Now that he’s blogrolled me, I can’t tease him about that. Thanks, Brian!) Two things made me reconsider the way I manage people while managing a project: things we discussed at dinner, and Brian’s recent posting about the explicit role of the …
Experienced Project Managers Manage Similarly to ScrumMasters Read More »
As you can probably tell, I think people are the most important equation in successful product development. Good people can trump inadequate management and/or an inappropriate process. Dorset House has announced the pre-publication price for my book (available in September). I wrote a little more about this on my Hiring Technical People blog.
I’m a fan of nightly builds with automated smoke tests, run overnight. In the morning when everyone returns to work, anyone who’s broken the build fixes it. In most cases, the developers see what they did and they fix it. The agile folks take this even further and say to build the system whenever …
I think of development and test as partners. The developers create product and defects. The testers detect product and defects. They both need to understand what the product is supposed to be and how it’s supposed to work (the requirements). The more the developers explain the architecture and design, the better the testers can …
Why Create Tension Between Development and Test? Read More »
Via Steve Norrie’s weblog, I found Kovitz’s “Hidden Skills that Support Phased and Agile Requirements Engineering”. In phased development, projects promise large feature sets to a customer for future delivery. In agile projects, the requirements are refined over numerous little conversations with the customer, day in, day out. Kovitz claims the skills required for agile …
Bloglet subscribers saw two posts from me Friday. They saw the post I published *and* the post I saved as a draft. Surprised me. Since I know about this feature, I’ll work around it, and compose future drafts somewhere else. This isn’t a big-deal problem for me. But it was a surprise, and a …
Defect or a Feature — Choose your user requirements Read More »