“I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct,[…] If this is true, building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet.” – Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. 1987
Skip The Requirements, Empower The Developers
Enough of the debates about requirements and what we call them. Why don’t we just hire great developers and empower them to work directly with the customers?
Burndown Bullied Into Business Analysis
Burndown is a technique used in Scrum projects for tracking the progress within or across sprints. It is an exciting way to track how a team is progressing against a deadline – and we can apply it to any form of project-status. In this article, we will apply it to […]
Insight Into Test Driven Development
James Kovacs shares a great insight on software testing and the software testing process. His epiphany about test driven development makes it obvious to all of us why this technique is so powerful.
Making Agile Offshore Teams Work
Agile processes stress communication and colocation. Splitting a team into on and offshore resources inhibits the first and prevents the second. Teams struggle to resolve this apparent conflict of interest. Applying best practices (for any team) to address these challenges makes it possible. Martin Fowler provides us with great guidance based on years of experience with his company.
Agile Argument
Another challenge to a premise of agile comes in a well assembled argument from Tony at Seilevel, in his article, Agile…again.
Quick Thoughts on Incremental Project Management
Incremental delivery planning is not an oxymoron. You just plan the soon-to-happen tasks in detail, and keep the distant tasks more vague. Does this make sense? Rolling-Wave Planning Johanna Rothman has posted an article that provides a good introduction to rolling-wave planning. She explains that she manages incremental projects with […]
Business Analyst BOK 1.6 Just Released
The IIBA (International Institute of Business Analysis) has just released version 1.6 of A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge, or the BA BOK. This new release adds over 100 pages of content and is the first “essentially complete” version.
Companies Will Waste $1B This Year on Software Tools
Gartner reported that companies spent $3.7 Billion USD on application development tools in 2004, with a 5% annual growth rate. The Standish Group has shown that 40% to 60% of project failures are due to requirements failures. At least 1/3 of the money spent on getting more efficient at coding is being wasted – it should be spent on writing the right software.