project-management

I've been working with SVN for a couple of years and recently been working on some projects involving Trac. It might seem odd for most of you but I come from design oriented background where those tools are not so often used. For the moment we mostly use Basecamp to keep track of client requirements, documents etc. And on the other hand SVN for source control (between developers only). So, the aim being to integrate Trac to the bundle (and maybe other helpful features) I've been looking around for an online environment that could fulfill these requirements. There's a lot out there but my main

My company has recently started using Scrum; we've done 2 sprints. We're still learning, but we've definitely exposed and fixed some problems in our development process already. So in general I think it has been good for us. In reading many of the internet musings about Scrum from evangelists, cynics and everyone in between, three common and somewhat contradictory themes have stood out to me: Scrum implementation fails because the processes of Scrum are not followed closely enough. Scrum implementation fails because the organization does not adapt Scrum to its own environment/culture/practices

Do you actively manage technical debt debt on your software development projects and if so, how do you do it? One aspect of managing technical debt is in convincing non-technical managers that you need time allocated for refactoring and bug fixing. Here's an article with specific suggestions on how to do that. On our teams we actively manage technical debt. We do Scrum, so we spawn a technical debt card for either the current iteration or the next iteration depending on the estimate and our remaining sprint capacity and they get prioritized just like features and bug cards do. We also manage

Every software development professional (and especially project managers) has to deal with a never ending stream of e-mails. What is the best way of organising them in MS Outlook? Obviously some fancy issue tracking tools give more flexibility but I am interested in plain vanilla approach that can be deployed within most organisations. P.S. Finding e-mails is generally the least of the problems that needs to be addressed. Search nowdays is pretty good. Within my main inbox I have 3 sub folers: Do, Done, Defer and 3 macros to move the selected folder into the relevent folder. (alt-1 moves the

I work for a CMMI level 5 certified company and one thing I hate about is the amount of documents we prepare (As a programmer I already hate documents). We have lots and lots of documents like PID(project initiation doc), Business requirements, System requirements,tech spec, Code review checklist, issue logs, Defect logs, Configuration management plan, Configuration management check list(s), Release documents and lots... Almost 90% of these docs are just done for the sake of QA audit :) .. What do you think are the most important documents for a project? What documents can be used in the long

I have the opportunity to give a formal presentation to my boss about anything that benefits the company. My idea is to adopt source control in my workplace. I have been using Mercurial to manage my own project at work, but the rest of the team does not have a formal source control system in place. Unfortunately, I'm not very good at presenting ideas. So, can you guys tell me why developers MUST use source control? Additionally, why would you choose any tool except Visual SourceSafe? I don't have experience using VSS, but he is likely to ask why we wouldn't just use Microsoft's tools. I want

Anyone out there using Fogbugz and Scrum together? We use Fogbugz extensively, and I'm looking for ideas from anyone who may be using it as part of Scrum. I found these two items, but they are archived and unvailable for further discussion. I'm specifically interested in ideas for mapping Scrum concepts into Fogbugz. Some things are fairly obvious. Releases and sprints map well to each other. But other parts of Scrum don't really fit. http://support.fogcreek.com/default.asp?fogbugz.4.12143.4 http://support.fogcreek.com/default.asp?fogbugz.4.19971.3 I'm also thinking it might not be too hard to

This book was written in the era of time sharing systems, procedural programming, and about 30 fewer years in software engineering experience. With the improvement of things such as existing libraries, higher level languages, IDES, and the amount of documentation and examples available on the internet how much of the book still holds true? While I can believe that adding new people to a project may initially slow it down I would think things such as unit testing, separation of concerns, and other forms of automation and design improvements would allow new members of a team to become productive

I despise working with overengineered APIs that don't make simple things simple. Nonetheless, I'm working on designing an API for an open-source library and I'm starting to feel that I'm falling into the overengineering trap. I really can't tell for sure because, of course, I wrote the darn thing, so how it works is more obvious to me than anyone else. What are some warning signs from a developer's perspective that your API might be overengineered? "What are some warning signs from a developer's perspective that your API might be overengineered?" No use cases. If you can't run through simple

I know this is less programming related and more time management related, but I value the feedback of the users on this site. I'm finding myself particularly busy this semester, managing various tasks and timelines between work and school. Further, I find myself running around between labs, work, home, libraries, etc. For these reasons I think a web based solution is ideal. Which leads to the question, do you have a recommended web based solution for task/project management for personal use? Ideal would be free (or nearly), and one which I could install on my server. Accounting is not a