A grass roots campaign has been started by Peter Provost to get Microsoft to include unit testing support included with all versions of Visual Studio 2005 (VS). Currently, Microsoft is only including it with Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) versions of VS. This looks to be a great example of a killer feature in a product providing so much surprise and delight that people are demanding that it be universally available. This is also a great example of market segmentation by Microsoft. The irony is that there is an open source alternative that makes the opportunity cost very low, and yet people are still clamoring. Let’s see why.
Communication / Consulting / Project Management / Writing
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Targeted Communication – Status Reporting
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.
Communication / Consulting / Outsourcing / Project Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering
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Maine Mangles Medicaid – Charges CIO
Allan Holmes, for CIO Magazine just posted a scathing and detailed autopsy of the disastrous Medicaid Claims System project run by CSNI and launched in January of 2005. Requirements elicitation failures combined with incompetent vendor selection and project mismanagement lead to a $30,000,000 oops for the state of Maine, jeopardizing its credit rating. The system failed to process 300,000 claims in the first 3 months of operations, causing many health care providers to close their doors – and presumably causing citizens of Maine to go without needed services. Maine is the only state in the union (as of April 2005) not complying with federal HIPAA regulations.
Agile / Process Improvement / Software development
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Getting agile – should we?
Should we adopt an agile process for our team? Methods and Tools has posted a two part article titled Adopting an Agile Method. In thier article, they explore five areas of consideration. We provide our thoughts on each area. Five areas to consider (from the article) Our organization’s culture Our […]
Agile / Interaction design / Process Improvement / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements management software / Software development / Use Cases / UX
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Gartner research on Agile Requirements Definition and Management (RDM)
Gartner has a research report available for $95, titled Agile Requirements Definition and Management Will Benefit Application Development (report #G00126310 Apr 2005). The report is 7 pages long and makes an interesting read. Gartner makes a set of predictions for 2009 about requirements definition and management (RDM) systems, and the software created with RDM tools. Gartner misattributes several benefits of good process to RDM tools. We give them a 3.5/7 for their analysis – check out the details here.
Agile / Process Improvement / ROI / Software development
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Two big benefits of incremental delivery
Tarun Upadhyay wrote a fair criticism of our previous post on why incremental delivery is good on his blog today. It is great that he is extending the conversation, and he makes some valid points. We definitely missed a big benefit of incremental delivery, and will cover it in this post.
Interaction design / Requirements / Requirements management software / Software development / UX
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Persona Grata
Different people approach the same goal very differently. When we don’t truly identify our users, we end up with software that dehumanizes, waters-down, and otherwise fails to succeed at anything more than grudgingly tolerated functionality. Even worse, we may ignore the needs of our key demographic, resulting in software failure. When we use personas instead of generic use cases, we can avoid both the misery of a failed product and mediocrity of marginal success.
Product Management / Requirements / Software development
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Goldilocks and the Three Products
Michael on High-Tech Product Management and Marketing has a fantastic “wish I wrote that” post about the importance of having the right number of features. He has several references, the best of which is Kathy Sierra’s Featuritis vs. the Happy User Peak post from June 2005. The two posts combined provide great insight into why having too many features is bad, while acknowledging that too few is just as bad. In this post we will look at what we can do to apply these insights and also change the rules some, making our software more desireable than our competition.
Consulting / Foundation series / Process Improvement / Project Management / Software development
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Foundation Series: Basic PERT Estimate Tutorial
PERT is a technique for providing definitive estimates of how long it will take to complete tasks. We often estimate, or scope, the amount of time it will take us to complete a task or tasks. PERT allows us to provide not only an estimate, but a measure of how good the estimate is. Good estimates are a critical element in any software planning strategy. In this post, we will present an introduction to using PERT, explain how it works and how to interpret PERT estimates.