Archive of Software development Articles

June 18th, 2009

Advanced PERT Estimation

Creating a PERT estimate for a single task is both easy and straightforward. Creating an estimate for a set of tasks is still easy, but requires a little bit of math. Combining PERT estimates for tasks is easy, but not as obvious. Roll up your sleeves and dive in.

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April 29th, 2009

Personas Make Blue Ocean Strategy Proactive

Blue Ocean Strategy provides an interesting reactive analysis of companies and markets.  Personas are used to understand your customer’s needs.  Combining the two provides powerful proactive insights when positioning your product for market success.

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February 19th, 2009

Failure To Launch (Your Product)

Jump forward in time to the day of your next big product launch (first release, new features, new market segment, etc).  And your site/application crashes due to the “unexpected” demand.  All you can do now is look for a bucket of water to put out the fire.  What could you have done to prevent this disaster?  Jump back to today and start doing it!

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February 10th, 2009

Agile Non-Functional Requirements

Just because your requirement is not a user story does not mean you have to throw it out when planning your next sprint.  See one way (that is working) for managing non-functional requirements with an agile team.

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February 2nd, 2009

User Stories and Use Cases

User Stories are one of the key agile artifacts for helping implementation teams deliver the most important capabilities first.  They differ from use cases in some important ways, but share more commonalities than you might think.

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January 13th, 2009

2009 Bad Usability Calendar

Netlife Research brings us the 2009 Bad Usability calendar.  Get it while it’s hot.

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December 30th, 2008

Stakeholders in a Barrel

There’s really only one way to travel down a waterfall – in a barrel.  A lot of people died this way, but some survived.  Software projects have been predominantly waterfall projects since the start of software projects.  And stakeholders rode down those projects, basically in a barrel.  The people riding Niagara Falls 100 years ago didn’t know if they would survive until they got to the end.  Stakeholders in waterfall projects don’t know if they will succeed until the end.

An agile project is dependent upon tight interaction (and feedback) with stakeholders.

If you’re running an agile project, and your stakeholders are old-school barrel-riders, how do you make it work?

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December 11th, 2008

ProductCamp Austin Winter 2009

The second productcamp for Austin is just around the corner!  Are you going to be there?  You should.

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December 3rd, 2008

Simple Agile Model Example

A picture is worth a thousand words.  Agile values working software over comprehensive documentation, and it values customer collaboration over contract negotiation.  With that in mind, how much is a picture of a model worth?  Check out a simple example, how it helped, and what we didn’t do.

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November 12th, 2008

Satisficing Sprints

Satisficing probably makes more sense than perfecting your product.

Can?  Open.

Worms?  Everywhere.

Are we really saying “don’t make it perfect?”  Yup.

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