It is still as true today as the day it was written. This is because it is fundamentally about communication between people working on the same project, and none of the advances of the past 30 years have substantially changed that. Of course, we have learned a lot in those 30 years, but all improvements … Read more
You might want to think of your story as a vertical slice of the system. A story may (and often will) touch components in all of the architectural layers of the system. You might therefore want to think of your tasks as the work needed to be done on each of the components that your … Read more
Here’s the fundamental question. When will the client think they’re done? If they think they’ll be done by June, then you put an Agile team in place. That’s 4-6 people for 6 months. That’s the budget. Essentially, you do the multiplication for them. team * rate * 6 months. If they think they’ll be mostly … Read more
I would favour Trac. I’ve used Trac a long time over 7 years by now. I’ve also worked 3 years with Redmine. Latest versions I used in production were: Trac 1.0.1 and Redmine 2.2.3. But Redmine has some serious drawbacks over Trac: Installation is not easy: You cannot use Debian/Ubuntu package system for production use … Read more
Taiga is 100% free and has all the features that comes with something like JIRA. http://taiga.io/ It even has a burn-down chart! So that’s a win! Here’s a site with a nice overview of what Taiga integrates with and real developer opinions on the tool. http://stackshare.io/taiga
On general tips; We are implementing a process of 1) Business Requirements Statement (BRS) 2) Functional Specification 3) Technical specification The BRS covers what the business problems are, and what the requirements are around solutions, testing, security, reliability and delivery. This defines what would make a successful solution. The functional spec details what is needed, … Read more
Hofstadter’s Law: Any computing project will take twice as long as you think it will — even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
I develop and maintain internal applications for a family of manufacturing companies. As of the time of this comment, I’m the only developer/analyst on the IT team. During the worst of the recession my project demands exploded. As such my project AND issue backlog is quite unwieldy. We are currently in the process of restructuring … Read more
Scrum really doesn’t dictate that you have to be working on the one self-contained product. It simply states that there is a bunch of stuff that needs to be done (the product backlog), there is a certain amount of development time available in the next iteration (worked out from the project velocity) and there are … Read more
The exact circumstances are obviously very specific to your project ( e.g. development team, management style, process maturity, difficulty of the subject matter, etc.). In order to scope this a bit better so we can speak about it in anything but sweeping oversimplifications, I’m going to restate your question: Under what circumstances, if any, can … Read more