project planning

Articles

Hoarding: How to Prioritize Features to Clean Up the Clutter

Hoarding is an incredibly common—but usually unnamed and invisible—phenomenon in corporate software development. If you’ve been doing agile for a while, you are no doubt aware of the cost of hoarding and you’ve probably removed much of it, but what happens when you aren't doing agile yet? Clarke Ching explains how to counter hoarding by prioritizing the right features.

Clarke Ching's picture Clarke Ching
Did You Know That Your Product Portfolio Is in Trouble?

Based on his own work experiences, Anupam Kundu has found some patterns (or anti-patterns) that explain why product managers and product teams have a hard time managing their portfolios.

Anupam Kundu
Skipping Shortcuts: Convincing Clients to Take the Better Path

Your clients may not understand why you follow certain practices as a project professional. They may encourage you to take shortcuts that they believe will save time, money, and difficulty. You know better, but how can you convince them?

Brad  Egeland's picture Brad Egeland
Hours, Velocity, Siloed Teams, and Gantts

Johanna Rothman shares some tips for project and program managers turned ScrumMasters who are adopting agile. If your management won’t allow you to take training, start reading.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
Building Highly Productive Teams Building Highly Productive Teams: Factors that Influence Commitment-to-Progress Ratio

Aleksander Brancewicz addresses how to build a team that achieves a high commitment-to-progress ratio and presents the core skills and factors that influence this ratio.

Aleksander Brancewicz's picture Aleksander Brancewicz
Is Test Automation a “Project”?

Test automation can turn into a real pain in the neck if a designated team is in charge of it or if the automators work on it as a separate project. In this article, Lisa Crispin seconds Bob Jones’s recent call for whole-team test automation and elaborates on the dangers of relegating test automation to an isolated project rather than integrating it into the overall software development process.

Lisa Crispin's picture Lisa Crispin
Who Defines “Success” for Your Project?

An otherwise good project management book provokes Payson with definition of “success” that rubs him the wrong way. In this article, he presents his case.

Payson Hall's picture Payson Hall
No Group Is a Team on Day One

Assembling a group of people and declaring them a team doesn’t make them one. Do you have the conditions necessary for the team to form? What activities have they completed to help them find an identity, their purpose, and how they’ll interact with each other?

Don Gray's picture Don Gray
Reducing Surprise: Another Feature of Good Project Management

The portions of projects that are not yet complete occur in the future. Since the future is an uncertain place, there will always be surprises. Some surprises are so obvious that they should hardly be called surprises at all. This is the kind of surprise that project management helps to avoid.

Payson Hall's picture Payson Hall
Releasability status Ready to Ship?

On the surface, a Broadway musical, a newspaper, and software may not seem to have much—if anything—in common, but they have one common thread. All are delivered on a fixed schedule. But of the three, software tends to stray the most from the fixed schedule. In this week's column, Jeff Patton says that by focusing on the readiness of the entire product—as done in theatrical performances and when publishing a newspaper—and not just on the completion of the planned bits of work, you can produce software on a fixed schedule that you know is ready to ship.

Jeff Patton's picture Jeff Patton

Pages

AgileConnection is a TechWell community.

Through conferences, training, consulting, and online resources, TechWell helps you develop and deliver great software every day.