People & Teams

When time is of the essence and stress is high, it's easy to find your team drowning under the weight of impossible deadlines and spiraling requirements. Unfortunately, more projects go under due to poor management than for any other reason-and common responses to problems often make the situation worse, rather than better. The original sin of the software industry is the “tight, but doable” project schedule, caused by everything from market pressures to management perversity. Peter Clark shares the practical strategies he has used to return sanity to projects that seem hopelessly behind schedule and out of control. Learn to deal with and avoid mandatory overtime, task thrashing, distractions, scope creep, and more. By focusing on what is possible, you can re-energize the team and do the best job you can with the resources you have.

A high performance, self-governing team is a prerequisite for delivering better software products more quickly. Unfortunately, developing such a team is neither simple nor linear. It requires exceptional leadership to build and maintain a team on which everyone is focused on accomplishing a common goal. While high-performing teams may appear "headless," managing a collected group of experts requires a role typically more associated with a relationship manager than a project manager. Based on her consulting experiences and on Dr. David Kolb's five-phase leadership model, Bobbi Underbakke discusses the skills and techniques software managers and project leaders must have to maximize their team's capabilities and speed. Learn innovative ways to guide, motivate, and inspire your team rather than trying to monitor and control them.

When preparing for internationalization of software, officially called W3C Internationalization (I18N), preparation and careful planning are the keys to high productivity during and after the initial development project. By putting in more effort up front, less effort will be required in subsequent localization activities. Also, I18N pseudo-localization testing will help you ensure that you can deliver localized versions of your product in the least amount of time. Learn about the important issues surrounding internationalization: translation verification, double character, Unicode, multi-currency, local culture concerns, native language support, and more. Find out how to perform localization testing without an in-depth knowledge of locale specific issues or native linguistic skills. Help your organization succeed in the challenging work of internationalization while your team keeps its sanity as well.

As software professionals, we all care about quality. We focus our efforts on building quality into the code and testing to assess quality and find errors before our customers do. However, there is an important element of quality that comes before all that and is critical to delivering reliable software: quality working relationships and quality interactions. Esther Derby covers pragmatic strategies for building, strengthening, and maintaining working relationships with all stakeholders-managers, customers, team members, and peers. The first step is to build a foundation of trust and respect. Then, we must focus on interests rather than positions and seek joint solutions to problems. We should use the richest communication channel available for our interactions and make a generous interpretation of others’ actions.