Project Management for Software Development
Tutorials and tools for managing, estimating, planning and tracking software development projects: PMP, Agile, Scrum, Lean, Kanban
Collaboration is an essential ingredient in healthy Agile project communities, yet in my experience truly effective collaboration is perhaps the hardest thing to do well. We have become so adept at using e-mail, instant messaging, voice mail, and telephones to communicate that we have lost our preference for face-to-face communications.
We spend a large portion of our time thinking about code and technical project issues. What about the people side of things? The majority of project failures occur because of people, not technology. What we need are guides that help us navigate the waters between the people around us.
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...
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.
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.
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...
In this article, Christophe Le Coent discusses shared responsibilities and clear accountability in software development projects. He proposes a RACI+F matrix where the letters have the following meaning: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed, Facilitate. This allows to create RACI+F matrix for the Scrum project activities for each Scrum roles. This matrix...
Teams are not mentioned in the definition of Kanban. In his blog post, Yuval Yeret discusses the impact on team structure when an organization is trying to adopt Kanban. He proposes a categorization of teams modes and an evolutionary approach on how to use them when you adopt Kanban, starting...
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