Project Manager

As if releasing a quality software project on time were not difficult enough, poor management of planning, people, and process issues can be deadly to a project. Presenting a series of anti-pattern case studies, Ken Whitaker describes the most common deadly habits—and ways to avoid them.

Cloud-based development, delivery, and deployment environments are the future of IT operations. Thomas Stiehm shares the hard-learned lessons of setting up and running cloud-based solutions that implement DevOps for geographically distributed agile projects. Thomas describes how to best leverage the cloud to enable your teams to use it effectively. Learn why cloud software delivery is different from traditional software delivery environments, and how to optimize your platform and team to get the most out of the cloud.

Requirements defects are often the source of the majority of all software defects. Discovering and correcting a defect during testing is typically twenty-five times more expensive than correcting it during the requirements definition phase. Identifying and removing defects early in the software development lifecycle provides many benefits including reduced rework costs, less wasted effort, and greater team productivity. This translates into software projects that deliver the committed functionality on schedule, within budget, and with higher levels of customer satisfaction.

If innovation is not part of your team or organizational DNA, your company risks falling behind its competitors, losing market share, and demoralizing your best talent. And yet, you cannot create an innovative organization by simply saying “Be innovative” or adding it to the company values statement. Innovation requires a solid understanding of what motivates people and a deep examination of organizational structure, culture, and leadership styles—such as top-down project control or directive leadership—that may be barriers to innovation.

Kent Beck, inventor of eXtreme Programming, defined agile success as delivering more useful functionality with fewer defects. Against that definition, early research revealed mixed success. Many organizations did not know how to measure and thus could not have “fact-based” conversations about productivity and cost. Some teams achieved faster delivery, but quality did not improve. Others found both. What factors made the difference? New benchmark analysis by QSM Associates reveals the latest productivity, time-to-market, quality, and cost patterns.

One of software development’s  greatest challenges is combining business needs with technical abilities to build products that customers want. Many development methodologies attempt to achieve this, but Nir Szilagyi and Janarthanan Eindhal think that few connect the dots as well as behavior-driven development (BDD), an agile development methodology derived from test-driven development (TDD) and other agile practices. Unlike TDD, which focuses on code design, BDD focuses on the customer.

Agile development has evolved into a lifecycle that not only affects the IT department but the overall business as well. Forward-thinking enterprises recognize this and benefit from the software efficiency that agile development delivers. Through real-world examples, Jonathan Thorpe explains how enterprises can improve their agile success. Discover how successful global enterprises are applying the principles of agile development beyond just software development to a level where it affects entire business groups.

Until 2009, the Atlassian JIRA team shipped a major release of its software every nine to twelve months. Everything was tested—every story and every bug fix—and everything still contained serious bugs. Story development moved quickly, but after the feature-complete date, several month-long hardening periods were required to make the software actually shippable. Integrating the release into Atlassian’s hosted platform took another three or four months.

Teamwork is an important component of agile software development. We all agree that teamwork must be nurtured and grown in our organizations. But what does it mean to work as a team in the world of software development? How can we encourage our “teams” to truly work “as a team?” Woody Zuill and his team at Hunter Industries have found tremendous benefits following the whole team approach they call Mob Programming. Everyone works together at the same time, in the same space, on the same problem, and at the computer—every day, eight hours a day! How can this possibly work?

As semi-scientific software professionals, we like the idea of measuring our work. In some cases, our bosses like the idea much more than we do. Yet, meaningful software development metrics are notoriously challenging to define, and many people have given up trying because metrics often incentivize pathological behaviors. Since you get what you measure, most metrics lead development teams to optimize numeric proxies for success rather than the goals these proxies were intended to represent.

According to a recent study, more than 60 percent of CEOs cite the need to discover innovative ways of managing their organization’s structure, finances, people, and strategies as their top priority. In order to compete in the 21st century, organizations must rethink how they function—they must adapt or die. Derek Neighbors shows you how to meld chaos, creativity, and collaboration within your organization to unlock innovation. Learn how to balance fun and excellence to achieve results while redefining your organization's culture.

Is agile—or lean, kanban, lean startup, etc.—starting to follow the path of other management buzzwords in your organization? Is it losing steam, now resembling only a minor change from the old ways? Have you compromised to "make agile work in our organization?” As organizations introduce new paradigms, they often run into roadblocks of inertia. When these are not overcome, the initial excitement and the potential benefits drain away. Treating changes such as agile as merely a software delivery approach typically means disregarding four other key facets of the agile organization.

There is no doubt that agile is an accepted development methodology. However, if you work in a regulated industry like health care where you have to comply with its standard operating procedures, heaps of paperwork, and frequent audits, don’t these conflict with agile’s core tenets? Chris Ampenberger describes his operating environment and the applicable regulations that define the constraints for the software development process he can use. He shares how they overcame the incongruity between agile and regulatory requirements.

“Inspect and adapt” is one of the basic tenets of continuous improvement, and agility in general. Holding retrospectives is one of the core processes that allows teams to look back and reflect on their progress. However, over time, teams may focus only on the product work and lose interest in their own improvement as a team.

Agile development methods such as Scrum, XP, and kanban have achieved notable success in improving speed to value, reducing waste, and raising customer and team satisfaction. Successful practitioners worldwide have cut development times, improved product quality, and reduced development cost. Underlying these agile methods are timeless lean principles—focus on customer value, respect for people, and continuous improvement. Sanjiv Augustine describes how agile teams are implementing lean management.

Organizations are under pressure to release faster with higher quality, while business and technology environments are increasingly becoming more and more complex. How can you deploy great products quickly in such a challenging environment? Intuit, maker of TurboTax, is solving this problem with continuous delivery practices. Continuous delivery is the next stage of agile, allowing organizations to achieve greater velocity, repeatability, and sustainability through a continuous build, test, and deploy process.