Technical debt is the unfinished work the product development team accumulated from previous releases. This debt includes: design debt, where the design is insufficiently robust in some areas; development debt, where pieces of the code are missing; and testing debt, where tests were not developed or run against the code. Technical debt is common, but […]
Technical debt is the unfinished work the product development team accumulated from previous releases. This debt includes: design debt, where the design is insufficiently robust in some areas; development debt, where pieces of the code are missing; and testing debt, where tests were not developed or run against the code. Technical debt is common, but
I’m working with a group of people who are new to iterative development. They’re doing more of a staged delivery lifecycle than an agile lifecycle, but they are releasing about once a month. They don’t like it, because they say they’re releasing too frequently. The problem is that their planning and releasing take too
Sometimes I discover that one of my great ideas has already been discovered by other people 🙂 I first wrote about rolling wave planning in 1997. For those of you who can’t stomach the paper (it was one of my earliest pieces of writing), here’s an updated description of rolling wave planning: Loop: Plan what
I’m sure you’ve heard conversations like this: Senior Manager: “Candace, I know you said you needed twelve weeks to test this release, but we’re really in a jam. I need you to release sooner. What can you do for me in six weeks?” As much as you might like to say, “Um, not much,” that’s
You’re a project manager. You have too much work to fit into a project (scope) and not enough time to do it. What do you do? Timebox. Timeboxing is a technique to fit what you can accomplish (some of the scope) into the time you have allotted. Timeboxing works when you have fixed schedule
On the face of it, higher productivity looks like a Good Thing. More products for less time. Who wouldn’t want this? But I wonder about this search for higher productivity. What do managers really want? If you want to understand about productivity for software organizations, read Putnam and Myers’ new book, Five Core Metrics:
Sometimes on a project, we focus on an intermediate milestone in the project, such as Beta, or first performance test, or early ship. The project team works like dogs to make that intermediate milestone. Then, there’s still the rest of the project. Uh oh. Now you’re starting to cross the desert. (Thanks to Jack