Tutorials and tools for managing, estimating, planning and tracking software development projects: PMP, Agile, Scrum, Lean, Kanban
In this blog post, Steve Andrews discusses the usage of team velocity to plan the next Scrum sprints and how can we use it to make more informed management decisions. Using a quantitative management approach and Agile methods allows us to actually measure the impact of management decisions on the...
Steve McConnell presents 10 of the worst ways estimates go wrong and provides time-tested rules of thumb for dramatically improving estimation accuracy. The average project overruns its planned budget and schedule by 50%-80%. In practice, little work is done that could truly be called “estimation.” Many projects are scheduled using...
In this blog post, Johanna Rothman shows some of the common problem of teams that think they start using Scrum but stick to traditional project management planning. Some of the smells of this situation could be the fact that the ScrumMaster keep preparing Gantt charts for the iteration or that...
In this article, Brian Tarbox and Heather Mardis try to answer the classical question: “how long is this going to take?” They discuss the notion of velocity in Scrum and how to use it to estimate future sprints. But not all projects use the Scrum framework and people rarely record...
In this article, Robert Galen argues that traditional project managers DO need to reframe themselves and their approaches in an agile context. They must become context-based and situational in your approaches. However, “traditional” principles and techniques from the PMBOK shouldn’t be “thrown away” in agile projects.
This video shares the agile adoption experience that a Six Sigma Black Belt and an agile coach took borrowing concepts from Lean/Six Sigma to help promote and sustain the change that adoption to agile brought to the software development team. Are they opposing concepts or complementary?
This article share some key points for project managers that are starting out on Agile projects. These key points are process knowledge and coaching, effective communication, work transparency, acceptance of change and continuous planning, encouragement of a self-managing team. He concludes that Agile processes usually succeed when a PM and...
Creating a successful open-source project involves far more than simply writing some code and putting it up on (GitHub|CodePlex|SourceForge|*). This talk will cover some of the basics of marketing an open-source project. It discusses what should be considered as “marketing” as well as give plenty of practical “how to” about...