Musings of a Software Development Manager

Long ago Scott Ambler discussed the idea of a specializing generalist, an element critical for Agile teams. Stumbling across the definition of a generalist who has developed some deep skills in certain areas, but broad skills in a variety of functions felt natural. As a very old web developer I long ago spread out from [...]

As a project manager on dozens of projects I have sent hundreds or perhaps thousands of project status reports. I’ve read even more status reports as a development manager often showing up Friday afternoons in the old inbox. Every status report needs to cover the basics like budget, scope, and schedule. Other than that the [...]

Keeping you backlog in order doesn’t tend to happen in isolation. My past experience is the backlog drifts because of a concentration on completing day to day Sprint tasks. You can tell when the backlog has drifted, the planning meeting goes long. Kane Mar suggests an approach of using a Story Time meeting. A Story [...]

Agile is really designed around software projects. Infrastructure is a different animal. With an infrastructure project some things start to break down: You usually aren’t writing much code, maybe some database install scripts so no unit tests. Often there’s no continuous integration to speak of. Configuration tasks on new software are often difficult to estimate. [...]

A good PM should annoy a developer some of the time.

In the last two years of using Scrum on projects the Sprint Backlog was: Excel Spreadsheets: 6 Task Boards: 4 Spreadsheets are winning. Our environment is a medium sized financial services company with independent projects. We don’t have Scrum of Scrums or any need for them at this point. Everyone is located on-site with the [...]

Dina, one of the creators of the project management podcast Controlling Chaos, is heading back to MBA school at age 42. Better yet, she’s planning on attending UC Davis MBA School which is currently the best available option in the Sacramento region. And best yet, she’s blogging the experience. Her decision to go for it [...]

Dave Churchville recently expounded on ideal days versus story points: Personally, I tend to prefer the ideal time units, since it’s easier to explain to customers, but I have heard reports that point systems have had good results as well after the initial confusion. My problem with story points is the teams have never gotten [...]

I took a personal day this past Friday after realizing I was just burnt, fried, and generally stressed and not that useful. I pondered whether I should or not for far too long. The reason for the difficult decision–I didn’t want to give up control of several projects. I’d been planning to take a personal [...]

I learned a few days ago that a simple information radiator such as a task board can be extremely threatening. Our PM/Scrum Master on a project announced a recent unilateral decision to switch meeting rooms simply to escape the dangerous distractions of a task board. Apparently the team found the task board a more useful [...]