Agile development methodologies succeed because they help development teams be as effective as possible. Development teams do not, however, work in complete isolation. The company they work for has a strategy. The company manages a portfolio of products, and targets a particular product at specific market problems. Within that context, […]
Project Management
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Recycling An Article on Timeboxing Your Project Plan
We’re dedicating our “blogging time†this week to doing some infrastructure upgrades – we have to address some security issues on the site. Until we get through these changes, we’ll be recycling some of our existing content. For our recent readers, it will be “new to you†and for our […]
Agile / Prioritization / Product Management / Requirements / Software development
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Plan For Today, And Plan Correctly For Tomorrow
Instead of Prioritize the present when planning your product. Neglecting the future is almost as bad as over-emphasizing it. The key is to incorporate your plans for the future correctly by making them play second fiddle to the present needs of your market. Serve both today and tomorrow – but […]
Flashback
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Flashback: A Year Ago This Week on Tyner Blain [2006-04-14]
A look back at the best from a year ago.
Agile / Process Improvement / Software development
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Code Debt: Neither A Borrower…
Code Debt is the debt we incur when we write sloppy code. We might do this to rush something out the door, with the plan to refactor later. Agile methodologies focus on delivering functionality quickly. They also invoke a mantra of refactoring – “make it better next release.” This can create pressure to “get it done” that overwhelms the objective of “get it done right.” Taking on code debt like this is about as smart as using one credit card to pay off another one.
Product Management / Project Management
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Outside Reading and Thanks!
For your weekend reading pleasure, an interview and an article.
Agile / Prioritization / Product Management / Software development
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Product Managers Are Critical To Success
The product manager role is strategic. Product managers identify valuable problems in the market and determine which of them should be solved with software. They create a vision and strategy for solving those problems. Everything else happens in that context. James Shore has written a post on the importance of […]
Agile / Lists / Process Improvement / Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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Ten Essential Practices of Continuous Integration
Martin Fowler has identified the key process elements of making Continuous Integration work. You could even argue that they are the elements that define Continuous Integration (done correctly). We include his list and our thoughts below:
Process Improvement / Project Management / Software development / Use Cases
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Where Did You Get That Estimate?
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.