'How many project managers does it take to change a light bulb? Trick question. They can't actually do it. But they can record what percentage is complete.'
Three of the nerdiest valentine's day ideas to surprise your partner.
I recently came across this very interesting Twitter thread which claims that:
Everyone wants to go Agile today. Teams want to put the user in the center of their product development process while building products. After all, you are building the product for your users, right?
Unit tests are just a waste of time: you'll always end up spending more effort maintaining them than writing code
Up until pretty recently my company’s tech team managed its projects through a Kanban-board. In practice this entailed that we’d come up with a product roadmap for the 12 months ahead and would start working on this from top to bottom, moving tickets through the usual swimming lanes as we went.
Agile Software Development can give companies versatility and help them navigate through change and complexities of the software space, improving efficiency.
When you begin working on a complex project, the sheer number of tasks can be overwhelming. Especially if different tasks are assigned to different people on the team, and each has its own deadline. How do you keep track of who must do what and by what date? The answer lies in specialized Gantt chart software.
Thirty years ago our managers enabled uninterrupted work. Today they throw as many interruptions at us as they can manage. Independent work is derided.
As a Project Manager, one of the most important things that I’ve learned over the years is that Daily Stand-Ups are an effective tool that can solve a particular problem.
A game with post-it notes that can be played both in-person or virtually using Mural or Miro for learning about your partner's likes, dislikes, and opinions.
Working in tech is a trip. Growth is almost always guaranteed, the pay's great, and you can easily get into the industry with tech-adjacent skills.
Delivery speed results in cost reduction; confidence enables speed; confidence requires quality.
Discussions on the November 2020 release of the Scrum Guide
I have been involved recently in Agile transformation, i went through lots of conversations, with Techy people, that have a lot of misconceptions about Agile.
Hello again, By reading the title you might have thought I’ll be explaining about some algorithm/tool but for a change let’s talk about project management and how adding a new person(at a specific time) into the project could be dangerous and what to avoid. Let’s get straight into the topic of Brook’s law.
As every child of the ‘80’s knows – the most effective way to become a karate expert is not through years of dedicated training, but rather by completing a sequence of seemingly tedious chores for an elderly Japanese neighbor. Thanks to the miracle of muscle memory, before you know it, you’ll have won the all-valley karate tournament. (Actually, now I think about it, this might have been one of the first, and most effective “hacks” I was ever exposed to).
A list of reasons why you should try documenting your relationship on Notion
Here are some of the reasons you should create a plan and layout your project before you get started.
I maintained an open-source project with 800k+ downloads/month. I learned six invaluable lessons and I will now share them with you.
It is good to have a scrum master involved in your agile process, but what makes a great scrum master? In this article we look to break down the fundamental pieces to becoming the best scrum master you are capable of being. First, we must define what a scrum master is.
During my years as a coder, business analyst and technology consultant, I have heard many a manager or business owner complain about their on-staff developer. I have even sometimes heard them referred to as a “single point of failure.” At that moment, I know that I am entering a political minefield. My years of experience alert me to the fact that if someone in power thinks their developer is a single point of failure, then most likely the developer is not being properly managed.
Have you ever wondered how time tracking can invest in your growth and raise the bar of your profitability? Investing every inch of a cent into production has always been crucial for the survival of thriving startups.
Learn how to do project estimation that removes deadlines and avoids stress from a successful software engineering leader.
To make sure your project does not spin out of control, you have to make healthy project management a priority.
Here are 5 JavaScript project management libraries that help to provide remote teams with an easy but effective way to organize tasks and activities.
Transitioning into product management can feel like being air-dropped into a war zone. From the moment you hit the ground there are new people and ideas bombarding you from every angle, and everything seems to be on fire. There is no clearly defined way to reach your destination, but you know you can’t just sit there. For most new product managers starting out, this is a critical moment for your career and the habits you build out as a product manager.
Engineering principles that lead to better, robust and maintainable codebases.
You know that the digital project management field is growing, so companies require a fantastic project manager (PM). In case you are a programmer, then you know about the working of digital tools, tight-knit teams, competing deadlines and outside clients. Therefore you can become a proper PM and fulfill the requirements of the company. In the modern era, the majority of the people are looking for programming as their careers, so you must have to find a path to stand out. It is possible that you get tired of optimizing user experience (UX) by debugging codes, and now you want a different type of challenge.
Excellent problem-solving skill is very essential for a Product Manager, because in the real day to day as a Product Manager will face a lot of complex problems that require deeply thinking for finding the root cause of problems, not only user’s problems but also internal problems such as slow development process, increase growth rate, increase retention rate, etc.
Why it is sometimes confusing to read about product management and why I wrote this guide: I actually wrote this guide in reaction to reading some other product management guides. I noticed that a lot of the guides I read were from pms at larger companies and didn’t actually have what I thought were the core pathways, skills, and experiences regarding product management. The guides did have a lot of tangential anecdotes, a lot of the typical hr-approved talking points of larger companies, and a lot of “check out this cool thing we did.” I tried to write this guide like something you’d hear after getting that Google pm drunk at a bar after the conference instead of hearing his talking points during the conference.
The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) refers to a methodology with clearly defined processes for creating high-quality software.
Technical debt exists on each project if it’s more than 1–3 months old. Having technical debt doesn’t necessarily mean that software engineers are not performing well. Technical debt can appear because of business pressure, lack of requirements, lack of interaction between team members etc. However, good software engineers know how to manage the technical debt and do that. Bad software engineers simply hide the tech debt from managers and customers, hoping that the project will be completed before it gets out of hand.
Here you will find out the main differences between Git and Github by diving deep into their functionality and use.
How to stop inactivity and just start what you want to do. The flywheel concept of getting things off the ground and the best and only time to start is now!
The metrics may not be the best model of what’s actually happening in the business every day, or people may use different definitions of the same in a way that makes it hard to understand.
According to CIO study, 50% of software projects fail. The Global Project Management Survey conducted by PMI reports that 27% of them run over-budget. Annually, these statistics change but the overall negative trend remains the same, which makes the problem of bringing potential threats to light especially important.
A model involving a dedicated software development team (Dedicated Team Model or, briefly, DTM) is a business model of financial collaboration that is frequently used in software development outsourcing. Taking into account the fact that many customers are interested in using this model, we decided to talk about its advantages and disadvantages, as well as highlight features that you need to know before deciding to cooperate on this model.
In 2020, an IT audit is important for all organizations. It provides insights into the business’ IT infrastructure and how it can be improved.
A tribe of Cannibals arrives at New York City.
Nothing compares to the value of opening yourself to inspiration by reading what others working in your field have to say. Looking up from your work to learn and stay updated on current trends is immensely important. New ideas don’t just pop into your head during meetings, you need to invest in seeking them out. And yet, taking the time to browse new titles is one of those things that always seems to get pushed to the bottom of the list. In a world of stressing deadlines and constant multitasking, actually sitting down to do “nothing but reading” takes some special effort.
Just around 2012 is when I received a lesson of a lifetime, to appreciate culture differences and how very deep they can get.
When developers first hear the business has decided to bring in Agile/Scrum, there is a feeling of dread. Agile methodologies are not usually brought in because the “powers-that-be” feel they are getting productive development from their coders. However, if you are an earnest developer you should welcome Agile/Scrum with open arms.
Visual story mapping is more than creating your run-of-the-mill to-do list. It is the best technique to enable your entire product management team to visualize multiple dimensions of information – and focus on how everything will come together to form a successful solution. Visual story maps align all product managers and create a common understanding of what needs to get done and how to go about doing it.
It is always worth remembering that good ideas are contagious. Other minds have wrestled with problems similar to yours before and effective solutions tend to bubble up and can be re-applied to new initiatives in ways that can often appear obvious in hindsight.
And their 4 areas of responsibility
It seems that the last 5 years in the global economy and science have become the time of the innovation boom. So many different things appeared, so often one began to use new terms and epithets, previously unknown to the public, that in fact it can be argued that hype and innovation are synonymous.
We communicated via Slack and Trello almost exclusively for the past three years at OneBar. Recently, we’ve discovered a way to reduce communications to just Slack, and the team loves the new, lighter process! It worked for us, and there’s a great chance it’ll work for you too!
We think of Software Development as a pursuit grounded in logic. From this perspective it can be shocking that software projects have high failure rates - 31% in 2014. And some projects fail to the tune of billions. How is this level of chaos possible in an apparently logical discipline?
In project management, there are several key success criteria for the possible implementation of any project: from building a plant, developing a software product, opening a new supermarket to something else. They are time, budget and quality.
Sometimes not only documentation but also the process of working on it may be critical. For example, in the case of projects, the lion’s share of the work is related to preparing documentation, and the wrong process may lead to errors and even loss of information, and, consequently, loss of time and benefits. But even if this topic is not central to your work, the right process can still improve the quality of the document and save you time.
Use weekly project plans to improve your agile team's ability to plan and reason about the future.
The README file is the very first item that developers examine when they access your Data Science project hosted on GitHub. Every developer should begin their exploration of your Data Science project by reading the README file. This will tell them everything they need to know, including how to install and use your project, how to contribute (if they have suggestions for improvement), and everything else.
In the 1930s, the Toyota Production System gave us lean manufacturing principles. Now, the IT, software and web development industry have also adopted these principles to improve their production processes. In actuality, the concepts and principles of Lean are used in more ways than just in manufacturing. Yet, in IT and software, there are still those who are pointing towards Agile development when they mention Lean and software development in the same context. While it is true that Agile and Lean principles share similar philosophies, there are key differences which set them apart. Diving deep inside Lean, I will discuss what lean talks about other than it’s key points.
Here are four techniques that can help your reclaim your control over your time: Time Blocking, Color-Coding, Batching, and Calendar Audits.
You may have heard the analogy that developing software is a lot like building a house.
The demand for software developers is ever-increasing, with many industries turning to IT for help concerning marketing, automation processes, etc. It's estimated that by the end of 2019, the total number of software developers will count over 26 million. Scattered around the globe, managing them online could prove to be a difficult job for managers.
Scrum is the most popular Agile framework today (56% of all Agile teams use Scrum).
Technical debt, approaches to its rapid repayment, and minimization on previous and current projects.
Scaled Agile Frameworks can take some figuring out. Let's understand SAFe. We'll see why to use it, its core elements and how it works.
Your product roadmapping is a viable means to depict how this product is prone to develop, to adjust the stakeholders, and to procure a money related arrangement for this product. In any case, making a powerful guide is difficult, especially in agile development, where changes happen as often as possible and often out of the blue. In this way, there are things never to overlook while making your roadmap and sprint backlog. Remembering them will help you in making an intense agile product using scrum sprint backlog, the roadmap template and other powerful product management tools.
Read this post to know the best Online Learning Platforms to Acquire New Skills And Enhance Existing Ones.
Product Manager as a function or practice is fairly old now. It has been around since 1931 (well at least in theory). It originated from a memo written by Neil McElroy, an Advertising Manager at Proctor and Gamble. He wrote this memo to the Executive Team of P&G suggesting the need of a “brand man”, a person solely responsible for the product and not the business.
If you are using Scrum it’s safe to say that you are also using Agile.
What is a Product Roadmap?
I wasn’t a big fan of managers in my decade long programming career. I took pride in my accomplishments as a developer, the individual contributor. After all, I was the one making things happen or part of the team that made things happen. We built features, fixed critical issues and in my view, only reason business existed was because developers worked hard.
We discuss a framework for categorizing stakeholders. We also recommend different communication methods for each type of stakeholder to save you time and effort
From the desk of a brilliant weirdo:
How to build a proactive and happy engineering team? What should you know to manage and lead the team of engineers more effectively? Here we’re going to share the startup guide with the helpful tips to make you a better manager and leader.
During the last several years working in the global corporate world I have come across a repeating challenge for distributed coders to efficiently work together as early as the beginning of their ramp up.
Hold daily standups. Ideally, this will take an hour every day.
“I would describe an engineering manager as a Sergeant Major. They are very much part of the mission delivery team and manage a group of experts to perform specific tasks,” says David Ives, Engineering Manager at Pusher.
It’s been nearly four decades since Microsoft developed their Project application as an internal management tool to organize their various software development projects. In 1984, they released it to the public (on floppy disk…CDs didn’t really become a software download mechanism until the mid-90s), and within a few years it became the dominant project-management software for the PC universe.
Setting up Environment Variables is the best practices in web dev world. But it seems troublesome for most people in practices, so few applied it. Well, it actually not that hard and it is necessary in most cases, let me show how you in this article.
tl;dr In this game of startups; some win, some lose.
The first time you finish a piece of software you've estimated, you discover a harsh reality ... software estimates are hard. Unexpected edge-cases, dependencies, meetings, and a thousand other things. This law summarizes it perfectly:
Wondering how to increase your remote team's productivity? These tools will help.
These 3 fundamental problems in the growth marketing of web3 projects create a huge gap between the crypto-savvy circle and the mass audience. Avoid them!
Most people’s story about looking for Asana alternatives:
Abhor online project management tools? They are an unrelenting aspect of remote work. Meet Slack, Asana, and WhatsApp, the three horsemen of the WFHpocalypse.
Disclaimer: long read. About the painful stuff, what I want to share for more than a month. Also does not claim to be complete, it is more about how I try to deal with it.
In our previous blog post, we wrote about Agile, a philosophy for managing projects and teams. In that text, we mentioned Agile methods, one of them being Scrum.
Believe it or not, almost 85 percent of global IT firms sway away from annual plans and waste at least 9 weeks on average while trying to cross-collaborate with different teams, across diverse geographies, and using a myriad of tool sets.
Okay – I know thats an excessively dramatic title, but I wanted to emphasize a simple but important concept. I believe that normalizing remote work isn’t a single problem to be solved, but rather a number of distinct issues that need to be tackled separately.
Recycle the programming projects you complete: iterate on them and create your own mini-projects along the way. Here’s how.
When I wrote "Your Developer is not a Single Point of Failure" there was definitely push back from managers, suits and other C-Suite denizens. Without a doubt, developers can be single points of failure. I would be lying, if I did not acknowledge the "historical blame" lies mostly at the feet of developers for the belief coders are single points of failure. Too many software developers built ivory towers of code for the sake of job security. Too many businesses were held hostage to custom algorithms only a handful of people could decipher...perhaps only ONE person could!
This post is based on my talk at MeasureFest in September 2019, which in turn is based on my experience running cross-functional marketing teams using Agile/Scrum frameworks.
The state of affairs
Project Management Institute claims that one out of four organization’s projects failed outright. The numbers are far from being encouraging.
It is believed that product managers should help a company do something that makes sense and advise against doing something that doesn’t.
During my tenure at Amazon, the teams I was leading used to follow a very effective scrum process. It was made possible by an internal tool called SIM, which was integrated with various other internal tools, enabling a seamless project management experience.
If you’re working on something new, there are so many directions your work and product can take.
Developers with a strong understanding of company strategy rise faster, despite the misconception that engineers should only focus on technical details.
Quick summary: A project is about to fail. Everybody feels it won’t meet the hard deadline. But the app ended up released on time and bug-free. How is that possible?
Project management is a complex field in software development. Sometimes you, as a project manager, feel like they are responsible for everything. Since your performance directly affects the success rate of the entire project. Project managers not only manage tasks but, most importantly, thoroughly guide the team toward the project goals. Being a great project manager requires interdisciplinary approaches and the ability to master both hard and soft skills. Let’s have a closer look at three essential competencies for the project manager to be successful.
How do you prove that the software is working? How do you know you are not introducing harmful side effects? This is Software Testing 101!
There are too many agile meetings that tech teams use. Save by adopting the essential types of agile meetings I use on my teams.
Can software project estimation be as realistic as possible? This article will walk you through how we, at UpsilonIT, approach the estimating process. We will also share some hands-on techniques and useful tips on making it more accurate and robust.
The software development process is complicated and, at times, chaotic. To make it less so, all its stages must be well-organized, planned, and agreed upon. Miscommunication, lack of clarity, and missed deadlines will jeopardize any project.
If you think that a breakthrough idea, strict development deadlines, and marketing strategy are all you need to make your product hit the mark – think again. The reality is, on top of fierce competition and demanding customers, 9 out of 10 startups fail because their solution has no market fit.
People keep confusing agile with product development but they are different concepts. It’s important to make this distinction because it actually matters. It isn’t just semantics, the confusion is causing us all problems. Understanding this difference may fundamentally change the approach most organisations take to building digital products.
If you are an experienced developer or a senior Java programmer, like someone with more than 5 to 8 years of experience, and wondering how to get to the next level, then you have come to the right place.
Estimating IT projects is a pain. When I started my path and tried to estimate my time spent while being a developer, I always underestimated things. Every time there would appear a job I didn’t account for. Colleagues told me to multiply my estimates by 2, 3, the number Pi. Only it didn’t help to increase the estimation accuracy, just added other problems. For example, when I had to explain where the high numbers came from.
Mindset and ability to adapt to a project can matter even more than the project itself when it comes to satisfaction.
How Jira, Hygger, Asana, and Others Surprised Their Users in 2019?
Every battle is won before it is fought.
~ Sun Tzu
Your project may contain tasks that depend on each other. Sometimes a task cannot start until its dependent (predecessor) task finishes, or maybe the task can start when its dependent task starts as well. As you manage tasks with these more complex dependency types (FS, SF, SS, FF), you may find more specialized software or SaaS tool to help you plan and visualize these tasks.
From the desk of brilliant weirdo #1: “What does a project manager really do?” Maybe that’s a question you’ve been asking yourself or others if you have been considering a PM career for a while. To be honest, it’s gonna be quite hard to put all the PM roles under one roof as project managers in one industry can differ from PMs in another. But I’ll do my best to give you a clear image of what it looks like to be a project manager.
From the desk of a brilliant weirdo #1:
What distinguishes great programmers from good ones?
The definition and content of activities of the software development manager can vary widely.
Defining the Data Science Problems the right way is hard work. The failure rate of various data science initiatives is really high — often ~70-80%.
Project Management for a team is an important task at the best of times. Many processes make a project successful- scheduling, planning, executing, and other stages. However, project management can get trickier when your team is distributed across the world and working remotely.
Not a developer yourself, but ended up in charge of a bunch of them? Here are 8 tips to working with them effectively without being too annoying or a bother.
A simple hack on your browser that can get you more focused and keep you out of web browsing rabbit holes.
Learn how you can create detailed graphs, extensive spreadsheets, and other Excel functionalities in Jira and Confluence without having to switch to Excel.
Nataliia Zub shared her perspective about secure digital transformation, risk management in times of crisis, as well as Engineering Leadership as a mindset.
Tech debt is deferred work for later. Think of technical debt as analogous to financial debt. It's not just the way they are named. If you have a debt — there i
Our concepts of Lead Time and Cycle Time came from the field of Operations Management and Production Engineering. As such, I think it’s beneficial to all of us to maintain coherent with them and use the same semantics in Software Engineering Management as well.
Cross-pollination between projects is a reliable method to recharge our creativity.
It is extremely difficult to make an accurate project estimation. It requires skills as well as experience. You need to consider the deliverables, tasks, and processes in order to create a workable estimate. Making a precise project estimation also requires a good relationship with the client, because you need to be clear on their requirements, according to which the estimation is made.
A project specification is a comprehensive description of the objectives for the development of the project. It contains all the goals, functionality, and details required for a development team to fulfill the vision of the client. It describes how the software product will be used from a user perspective and performance details such as speed, availability, and response time.
Photo by Perry Grone on Unsplash
1/17/2023: Top 5 stories on the Hackernoon homepage!
The Art of Money Getting or, Golden Rules for Making Money by P. T. Barnum is part of HackerNoon’s Book Blog Post series. The table of Links for this book can be found here.
We observe an increasing share of distributed teams and the growing popularity of remote work. And there seems to be some contradiction, as at the first glance Agile and distributed teams do not merge well. The Agile methodology is laid down in the famous Agile Manifesto and is based on the twelve principles derived from it.
Microservices-based projects are a great idea to deliver products in less time and with great flexibility/agility.
If your project is considering PaaS, then you may be worried about how this change might impact your team—and rightfully so. Switching to PaaS often results in major shifts in roles and responsibilities.
Once upon a time, the emerging of the blockchain seemed to initiate a parallel new era, a utopia of the Value Internet. However, now the tide has receded, Bitcoin and Ethereum, as the flagships of the blockchain, are still struggling to get out of the dark tunnel, and the difficulty of landing various blockchain applications still has not been resolved.
The work of IT teams is done for the people who are paying to them, i.e. clients. Even if you are working on an internal product, everything has its customer and buyer.
Work from home is the new normal in 2021, which is a bad news for first-time project managers. The good news is anyone can master the art of remote management.
We live in a world where change is the only constant. Right from the dawn of time, sustainable approaches have rendered the traditional ones obsolete and this, of course, is evident in diverse sectors especially the workforce. Why do something the hard way when you can get better results doing it the easy way, marketers usually ask.
Finding a Scrum Master is simple and complex. There are plenty of people out there who call themselves “Scrum Masters”, but how do you know if the person you are hiring really is a great Scrum Master?
Seems like everything has been written about effective one-on-one meetings. There are classes available, workshops suggesting ultimate know-hows, and experts offering their services to corporate and HR managers.
If it brings no value to users, chances are, no one will use it.
User stories are brief, informal descriptions of a feature told from user POV.
The bread and butter of knowledge work is figuring out what needs to be done, in what order, and what can be cut.
AI best practices, project management, ML solutions development, data science success.
When go on vacation or quit, you should ideally organize your work in a way that those who stay at work do not get lost in chaos. Here is a checklist for you
I have always been wowed by people’s irrational desire to avoid healthy conflicts at work. It seemed that their primary goal is not to achieve results but to treat each other politely. Everyone was super polite and courteous. We were not making pots and pans; we were celebrating the Day of Politeness.
Whether you loathe online project management tools a little or a lot, they are an unrelenting feature of remote work. Slack, Asana, WhatsApp (and/or Telegram) a
When it comes to working and managing projects, the best way to do so is by setting up an office and communicating in person. However, with the current state of affairs, it is highly unlikely that most corporations would even consider the possibility of risking the health and safety of others and themselves, and so most companies have switched to other means of working - working remotely.
This is a short guide from the Head of Project Management at Techstack, detailing practical steps for managing your time effectively.
Can anyone be a Product Owner (PO)? What’s the best position in the company to fill that role? With Scrum you have one and only one product owner for a given product – not a committee, but the effectiveness of the product owner will vary depending on the PO’s organizational enablement, understanding of the product, and involvement with the Scrum Team.
Parkinson’s Effect is all about an overlooked barrier to efficient time management summarised as; every task takes exactly the amount of time you devote to it.
These are three great Jira Plugins (add-ons) to boost your digital project management in 2022. Improve your Jira workflows and interactions with your teams.
As a compact team of two or three founders, it’s easy to stay organized… But when you’re doing well the team grows. Suddenly you’re managing a team of 5! Keeping track of everything, such as projects, tasks, new features, marketing campaigns, and more becomes much more difficult.
“The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” – Theodore Roosevelt
Outbound logistics play a critical role in a company's overall supply chain management and can significantly impact its bottom line.
When the outcome of a process is negative and deviates from its intended plan, it’s the process, not people that should be blamed
The first part of an educational blog covering general planning. This specifically focuses on the why's of planning.
Project Economy is another new way people are learning to make money in the world buy working from one project to another, using their skills to add value.
Bullet issues… Each IT project has tasks of this type. They are small, simple, but once you forget about them, something gets killed suddenly.
Taking on a management role in engineering may be daunting at first. Here are some tips for getting through the initial period, based on my experience.
“In these unprecedented times…” People build unprecedented products, and contribute to the internet in unprecedented ways.
I returned with a newfound conviction that I was exactly where I needed to be, and simply needed to define the values I am passionate to pursue. I grew up in the Soviet Union. While I am now removed from the days of government surveilling my every word and action, I've found that culture of surveillance replicated everywhere online.
A story of how we turned a regular company into a global network of professionals working toward a common goal -- and the lessons we learned along the way.
Cybersecurity is among the most significant trends over the last decade and has become even more important now, especially due to more remote work being done. From ransomware to cyber espionage, hackers have developed sophisticated techniques to break into your project/company data and get away with critical information or demand ransom.
Even well known organizations such as Canon, Garmin, Twitter, Honda, and Travelex have fallen victims to malicious actors. A data breach can be a disaster for your company/project, destroy the trust of your customers, and spoil your company’s reputation.
Learn why the Discovery Phase is important and how you can benefit from such a preliminary comprehensive analysis.
While product management enjoys unquestioned support in the world’s most successful tech companies, other organisations that could substantially benefit from product management are still yet to adopt and embrace the discipline. So, I want to go through why you need product management in your tech or digital organisation.
This story covers basic GitHub Jira Integration without requiring admin privileges to install apps on Jira.
As my list of side projects grew ever larger, the list of abandoned, semifinished projects did so too.
It is established that estimating software projects is hard and takes longer time than you expect. What are techniques to learn, to improve estimation?
As project execution becomes more transactional, with expected outcomes, we might run the risk of not documenting the lessons learned.
Are we drowning in the chaos of too many thoughts and ideas? It seems as though our minds are constantly cluttered. How can we function regardless?
Let’s see how you can develop the skill of reading documentation! Most importantly, start by getting your answers from the documentation as you struggle.
Time is the most valuable asset, use it wisely. That is why you should prove your ideas before implementing them. Programming is time consuming, I love programming but I avoid writing code whenever it is possible. A perfect written software, that nobody wants, is just a waste. To identify if an idea worth implementing, I use these tactics.
What's the difference between the two most used approaches to PBI estimation? Learn what they are so that you can decide which one fits your team better.
How to do milestone identification, project plans, risk registries, and project updates.
As a developer, you need to do more than ship code: you must deliver consistently, on time, and keep people updated. Check out these 3 project management tips.
How many automated tests should you write? Just Enough. Just Enough Testing balances the need to ship with the quality your customers deserve.
Agile stepped in when linear requirement-based processes were playing around to impose project management processes and predictable delivery methodologies across complex software domain, driven by time and output. Even with a certain percentage of success, Agile hasn't managed to kill off the embedded waterfall behaviors, prescribed linear plans and over-complex management layers for delivering software en masse.
With thousands of security vulnerabilities reported each month in products ranging from hardware devices to firmware to popular software apps, how does one prioritise what needs the most attention? From a business and project management perspective, it makes sense to, first and foremost, allocate engineering and/or risk assessment resources to the most severe vulnerabilities that need immediate patching.
Today, the demand for remote IT teams is growing at a breakneck pace, and considering the recent COVID-19 outbreak that has led businesses into extreme work challenges reflecting the rise of engineering requirements.
Military minds understand their armies are really only as good as their sergeants. Sure an army needs officers, but often lower ranking officers are usually young and inexperienced. Though they outrank the sergeant, they lack the experience of real world execution. The sergeant, the non-commissioned officer, is also a leader of men. Their paths to this leadership position can be a much longer slog doing the same work as the mainline enlisted.
It seems clear that the world is going to be different after the Covid19 crisis is over. I think it behooves us to make sure it’s a good different. Businesses large and small are going to be facing so many headwinds that we desperately need to cut loose some of our anchors to offset. This might seem like the wrong time to implement change, but if we don’t shed some of our bad habits, we’ll never rise to these challenges.
In a typical project meeting most attendees do not contribute but attend just to hear the conversation. A large amount of developer time is wasted. This drains resources from the project and can create a scheduling nightmare.
Yeah, you read that right. I actually think that pipenv is better than venv for there are multiple reasons and a whole lot of thought behind it.
If you own a business but don't have a project manager on your team, find out all the benefits of having a specialist that can organize and direct development.
Are you managing your projects and teams using Microsoft 365? Read on to find out how you can boost your team dynamics and achieve improved productivity!
An incident postmortem is a meeting that brings together all of the people that were directly or indirectly involved in a project to discuss and document it.
One of the leading Free TON development teams - RSquad shares its experience in information systems design and teamwork
Find out what it takes to create a hit film or series.
Every business - and everyone - encounters problems, whether it's too few customers, a product now working, or a team not functioning as it should.
Before the pandemic, roughly 30% of the part-time workforce was working remotely. It is estimated this will expand to at least 48% post-pandemic. Until the pandemic is over, it’s unclear exactly how much of the full-time workforce that can work remotely will continue to do so.
Learn when to over-engineer a project to ensure a successful rewrite and high velocity with the Jobs to Be Done framework and when not to do such a thing
You, and you alone managed to birth your solution, despite the ambitious deadlines and resource constraints. The solution works - it’s standing tall on its own, but you know that it is but a gentle gust of wind away from needing your delicate and nuanced maintenance.
Starting a business is already difficult enough, launching a startup can be even more challenging due to the fast environment, pressure from investors, etc. As a small business, you need to manage a set of complex operations and because of this, it's no wonder that a lot of startups fail.
Mind mapping is a diagram that helps you organize your thoughts. Mind maps can be used for brainstorming, studying, planning, and writing.
How to estimate work efforts that are not well-defined yet, but the business needs them.
The Cynefin Framework helps leaders to make decisions in context, distinguishing different domains to match the reality before apply the right management tool.
In this article we will talk about using Gantt charts for Project Management. How this tool functions, and outlines its main benefits and drawbacks.
If you decide to outsource the development of the project, you must understand the specifics of this format of cooperation with the agency. You cannot fully control the “inner kitchen” of the project creation, will it be a startup or software for a large enterprise. But this is not necessary, as experienced agencies ensure the transparency and continuity of all work processes. They maintain constant communication with the client and resolve issues as they become available.
Factors to consider in scaling your enterprise solution: the do's , the don'ts and the maybe.
PM is not just a very important person from the C-suite. They play a crucial role in the live cycle of any product of the company and they are really supposed to wear suits, but they don’t. Because product managers are responsible not just for the technical side of the product, but of its heart and soul. The main difference of PM from any management position is the necessity to be involved in the product creation directly. The manager is not about producing, but about understanding the techniques and showing the direction for all the teams, as the PM should have the final image of the product.
Tom works in the estimating department of a mid-sized plumbing contractor. As he walks in the door Tuesday morning, he gets hit with the following:
Many remote team management theories offer the following model structure. It starts with:
What problems can arise and how to avoid them
Inherent uncertainty, data-driven behavior, rapid experimentation: characteristics of Machine Learning that disrupt traditional software engineering practices.
Monolithic architecture in software development. Discover the world of n-layered patterns and what they involve.
Over the years, the IT sector has displayed an exceptionally high rate of transition, rapidly reinventing everything again and again. The software testing industry is not resistant to the rapid state of expansion.
Once you begin your startup business, then comes the toughest part! To sustain and grow to a leading organization by managing the same with some brilliant ideas. Many of the leading management gurus have written a lot about how to achieve the same.
I devised a few ways to keep track of my time and to maintain focus during the “new-normal” (as they say) WFH days . Thought maybe it might be useful
An increase in productivity will almost always translate to an increase in revenue for the organization. These tips can help your business save time.
Choosing the right architecture for your project. Understanding common software architectural patterns that scale.
Is Scrum as universal as it seems to be?
The second part of a mini-series on project planning primers. This focuses on my experiences putting together ideas as a developer.
I know its conventional to open a new blog with some kind of declarative statement or thesis, but I want to start with a question. If you were to measure just one thing about your team, one metric that best captures “the human element” what would it be?
How PSA software helps professional service firms improve profitability by improving visibility into the company's entire resource pool & project delivery time.
“Core hours” defeat the purpose of working — but what about ensuring that work is done?
The leadership I’ve learned through life could be summed up and put on the front of a t-shirt, “95% of the leadership skills I learned, I learned in the Army.” If that saying isn't already a thing: ™️. Though I left the U.S. Army a little over 20 years ago, I still stand by that statement.
Project management systems are supposed to make the life of teams easier and the work process faster and more efficient.
Planning means more than just “staying organized”
a project's minimum person is the project's maximum
In the first part of this article, we have talked about the ways in which your customers may check if your statements of the security matter in your company line up with reality. Now let us focus on how to ensure that your security practices are actually working and how to avoid the numerous pitfalls on this way.
Will adding people or cutting scope help you reach your project deadline? Learn how planning and spreadsheets can help you find answers.
The focus must be on change management, but to ensure you can remain relevant in the global market, you must have an effective change management plan.
Suppose you have to add a new major feature to an app.
Recognizing that you have technical debt is easy. And if you don’t recognize it already, one of your engineers will likely tell you:)
The 2020 #Noonies are here,and they are both much greener and much bigger than last year.
Processes are essential for effective management. They keep people in sync, making it possible for team members to come together and achieve a shared goal. But they’re also dangerous. Processes can create the illusion that things are running smoothly because they’re moving along according to the shared understanding of how they’re “supposed to” run.
This is the Fallacy of Process — the idea that by adding consistency and predictability to a shared workflow, a given process is inherently valuable.
Too often, process becomes canon. A team develops an effective way of doing something, then returns to that framework indefinitely, long past its expiration date.
How many people here have a project idea or a WIP project? ✋ Hackathons are a constant stream of motivation and resources for building projects to the end.
This is what it would be
Project reporting has never been easier. Trello is a website that will host your company’s day-to-day tasks. It’s a platform that provides project management.
Improve your team's pull request management system to ship faster, more often.
You know that feeling when you work really hard on something for really long and it feels like nobody really notices? Hacker Noon’s Annual Tech Industry Awards, the 2020 Noonies, are here to help with that. Vote up YOUR best people and products today at NOONIES.TECH. Speaking of the best people and products in technology, here’s a quick intro to 2020 Noonie Nominee, Danylo Fedirko from Ukraine, who’s been nominated in the Technology category.
The moment you become a part of the corporate world, the term you get most familiar with is 'Project'. We can say that projects are the elementary part of the corporate world.
Monolith breakup strategies technical and project management
BizDevOps breaks divisions between Business, Development and Operations teams to deliver business value fast. Discover the principles and benefits of BizDevOps.
Let’s imagine you are paid to write emails.
I always ask myself this question — What is a good developer?
Over the years, I have been through a number of I.T. shops. Sometimes supporting users was a big part and other times it was not. One thing which was consistent was the enormous amounts of non-tech work support could generate. Without some kind of mechanism for funneling work into the I.T. department, it can become quite chaotic. Additionally, there can be undue stress for staff prioritizing things. Often circumstances force staff to use an arbitrary weighting of the severity of the issue, the title of the person reporting it and the history of ID-ten-T errors generated from the source. This is obviously a less than ideal way to prioritize work.
The faster you can develop a product, the sooner it gets to market and the more sales you make. Your brand improves its market position and credibility by beating competitors to the punch.
How my friend scaled his software development business by using this 6-step project execution blueprint.
Every month, dozens of software development companies come up with hundreds of ways for distributed teams to cooperate efficiently, as if they were working side by side in an open-plan office—online collaboration tools, audio and video conferencing solutions, project management systems, time tracking applications, etc.
Most of us who have worked on IT projects feel the resonance of Hofstadter's Law:
To realize real merits and demerits, an ambitious person needs to evaluate objectively the results of work, comparing it with similar results of other people in similar business situations or a similar project environment.
Recently I became the team lead in the company I am working for and here I want to share a few lessons that I already managed to learn.
Collaborative learning is an approach based on the teamwork of the employees' group to achieve a joint purpose. Such an approach allows one to learn from the experience of others, helps to generate more ideas, as well as establishes a solid rapport within a company.
If you struggle with team collaboration, then this article will show you how to use 8 powerful team collaboration strategies to put your team on the same page.
Just five years ago, remote work was considered to be the way of the future, but only the distant future. Most specialized web publications predicted a rise in the popularity of telecommuting, but only in ten years’ time. However, this future arrived much earlier.
Tradeoff between speed and quality is a myth.
Agile principles and values can be applied to the way you approach data science projects
One may not expect to use Salesforce for Planning Poker sessions, but see how Aditya Naag's planning-poker-salesforce repository can make this happen quite easily.
It probably doesn't have an universal answer other than using case-by-case judgments
To ensure that organizations have a cohesive approach to purchasing and introducing new tools, companies should standardize their software procurement process.
Kishore V from India has been nominated for a 2020#Noonie in the Future Heroes and Technology categories..
Developer relations is a growing practice of engaging with external developers. In simple words, the job of a DevRel team is to make sure that developers working with the software or API are happy, which positively affects the image of the platform and leads to its popularity.
Learn how to plan and execute a website redesign, whether you use a CMS like Drupal or you build a site from scratch.
In our previous blog post, we wrote about Agile, a philosophy for managing projects and teams. In that text, we mentioned Agile methods, one of them being Scrum.
Over the last 20 years, our Project Manager, Pedro, has helped build many startups.
Hello everyone! It’s been a while since the last part but we made it! For those of you who haven’t read the previous parts or are wondering what I planned for the next parts:
The five methods of facilitation I use to create collaborative meetings from over a decade of experience as a software engineering leader.
As managers, we easily get frustrated with developers. Maybe they can't build a certain feature; or a bug fix you deemed critical to your business is too far down the backlog for comfort.
Renovation projects have a lot of moving parts that must work simultaneously. No wonder, large projects take 20% longer to finish than scheduled and are 80% over budget. From planning to budgeting to hiring to the actual remodeling, all processes have to be coordinated for the whole project to be completed.
Thanks to modern technology, it’s possible to update blueprints, create and sign contracts, and care for your construction workers from your smartphone. To help take your company to the next level, check out these top construction apps.
From the desk of a brilliant weirdo #1:
These little-known, scientifically proven customer retention strategies ALWAYS work.
A million pompous Tweets, a thousand pontifical TedX videos and hundreds of unnecessary hot takes don’t lie: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here, and it’s here to stay. Ok. Good. What now? Well, before AI can truly be called a democratised technology, we have to go beyond Silicon Valley startups and implement it within small/medium businesses and governments to reap the rewards promised by the technology.
On every new software product, feature or project you develop you are bound to come across challenges that don’t have a clear answer at first.
From the desk of a brilliant weirdo #1: If you’re having a hard time getting your team on the same page, I want to let you know that you’re not alone.
In 2016, ICO became the main way of financing innovation and blockchain startups. The first project, released on ICO, was Mastercoin in 2013. After it, thousands of projects attracted funding through the emission of tokens. According to ICODATA in 2017, the volume of investments raised through ICO (Initial Coins Offerings) were more than $6.2 billion, in 2018 — about $8 billion. After analyzing the data from the TokenData, it can be concluded that in 2018, unfortunately majority of the projects turned out to be a scam.
Disclaimer: the author has no vested interest in the brands mentioned here.
Marketing project management refers to the process of planning, leading, and monitoring the execution of marketing projects to make sure they’re delivered on time and within budget. At least, that’s the gist of it.
This week’s Quality Sense guest has been at her company now for 16 years, but in that time she has had the chance to assume several different roles that allowed her to explore her interests, lead others, and help the company grow. Ashley Hunsberger started as a manual tester and today, she’s the Director of DevOps Engineering, creating their Developer and Agile Advocacy program. She focuses on the ways they can advance the work their teams are doing, as well as the way in which they do it.
