Project Management for Software Development

A Kanban Team and Their Contracts with Partners

One very important property in Kanban is called “make process policies explicit”. This includes well-defined interfaces to upstream as well as downstream partners. Kanban tries to define these interfaces on a very abstract level, because Kanban is a change management approach that wants to integrate with several possible project management...

Agile Project Managers versus PMPs

In this article, Juan Banda discusses the visions of project management from the PMP and Agile sides. On one side, the traditional project manager follows the PMBok Guide and manage a project trough planning and control. On the other side, Agile project try to empower the team member and produce...

The Surprising Science Behind Agile Leadership

Not everyone is a fan of the self directed self organizing team. It flies in the face of traditional project management, and often conflicts with the traditional organization model. The benefits of self directed teams however are too big to ignore and now we have scientific proof as to why.

Scrum Velocity for Non-Agile Teams

This short article provides an approach to adapt the Scrum concept of velocity to traditional project teams that are working without using the sprints/iterations of Agile project frameworks. In Scrum, velocity is how much product backlog effort a team can handle in one sprint.

Dysfunctional Project Management Patterns

Inspired by the Gang of Four patterns for object oriented software development, Michael Duell proposes in this article some patterns for dysfunctional project management behavior. He classifies them in the cremational, destructural and misbehavioral patterns categories.

Should you Try to Stop Estimating your Projects?

In this blog post, Jim Bird discusses the issues of estimating in software development. He starts by reminding some of the modern lean concepts that condemn estimation. For him, this is applied mainly in context where delivering is more important than predictability.

Value: The Missing Agile Principle?

Agile principles begin with the notion of creating valuable software, but fail to explain what that term means. Value is not defined by process or output, but rather results for the customer and the business. Every member of the agile team should feel like an owner of the term “valuable”.

Software Project Teams: Small is Beautiful

The article “Familiar Metric Management – Small is Beautiful Once Again” (PDF) by Lawrence H. Putnam and Ware Myers discusses the fact that in software development projects, small teams are more efficient than larger one. They provides metrics showing that the concept of using small teams in software development is...