I am a very busy person (as I am sure most people are). As a result, I am constantly looking for ways to reduce the time I spend on things I need to do so that I can spend more time on things that I want to do (such as family time with my wife …
On many projects, the question I many times hear is “how much time have you spent?” Time tracking systems are often created to track time spent. This seems logical and often times people do not think twice about it, but it is one of the leading factors contributing to late projects. Let’s look at an …
Time Remaining is More Important Than Time Spent Read More »
One of my high school teachers introduced the Cornell Note-taking System to us. To be honest, at the time I rarely read any of the required reading and took minimal notes so I did not think much about it. It wasn’t until later when I was attending meetings at my job and taking graduate classes …
One of the artifacts used to track work on an agile project is the release burndown chart. This chart plots functionality along the y-axis and time along the x-axis. A line is then drawn from the size of the desired functionality over to the correct time, labeled the “ideal” line. This is the line that …
Release Burndown + Cone of Uncertainty = Release Uncertainty Burndown? Read More »
Below is the PowerPoint from the presentation that myself, Randy Makoski from Paychex and Jason Smith from IBM presented at IBM Innovate 2013. The topic of our presentation was why we chose to implement the Jazz Suite (Rational Team Concert & Rational Requirements Composer), our adoption approach, successes and challenges. If you have any questions …
Warning: Even though this book has a great message regarding change, please do not try to explain it to your friends. They will look at you funny and probably lose faith in anything that you say in the future. Instead, just let them borrow your copy and spend 30 minutes to read it for themselves. …
One of the challenges that I have faced in both my professional and entrepreneurial career is that I am young and therefore others perceive that I lack the experience that others who are older than myself have. I recently read “The Power of Starting Something Stupid” by Richie Norton (full review to come soon) and …
Defect Density is defined as the number of defects for a specific time divided by the overall size of the component or project. *Size is defined in either lines of code changed (LOCC) or function points (FP), depending on who you talk to. I have been on teams that use this calculation, but …
Anyone who has ever worked on a project probably realizes there are three (really four, but people often forget about the fourth) criteria that project success is focused on: 1. Features (Requirements) 2. Estimates (Cost) 3. Schedule (Timeframe) 4. Quality (Often forgotten about since it is hard to see/define/measure) Regardless of whether we use waterfall …