Flashback: A Year Ago This Week on Tyner Blain [2006-04-28]

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A look back at the best from a year ago.

Where Did You Get That Estimate?

bingo cage

How good are our estimates?

We can use PERT to estimate the time it will take to implement each requirement. We can use timeboxes to schedule the requirements within each release. If we don’t know how good our estimates are, its an exercise in futility. Scheduling is about more than predicting the future, its about knowing how much faith to have in our predictions.

Communicate Relevant Quality Metrics

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Most teams think about testing in terms of code coverage – what % of the lines of code are covered? What matters to our stakeholders is how well the software works. More precisely, how well does the software let the users work? We should be targeting our quality message in relevant terms, because users care about what they can do with software, not how well we programmed it.

The problem is that we tend to think about our software from the inside out, and our customers think about it from the outside in. We need a way to communicate our understanding of the insides within the customer’s framework of understanding the outside.

Targeted Communication – Status Reporting

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We’ve posted tips about targeted communication – tailoring the message for the audience. Anthony Mersino has an excellent post from January of this year about how to write a good status report. He provides seven excellent guidelines for status reporting, and all of them around providing the message our audience cares about, as effectively as possible.

  • Scott Sehlhorst

    Scott Sehlhorst is a product management and strategy consultant with over 30 years of experience in engineering, software development, and business. Scott founded Tyner Blain in 2005 to focus on helping companies, teams, and product managers build better products. Follow him on LinkedIn, and connect to see how Scott can help your organization.

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