No one likes surprises, least of all executives who might have given high-level commitments on project delivery to their peers in customer organizations, investors or other key stakeholders. I hold Project Managers largely responsible for poor ‘bad news management’. In most cases, there are half-baked estimates that never are a firm basis …more
There was a highly charged discussion on real colocation vs. remote colocation on one of the mailing lists. I think the number of posts far exceeded 100+ and eventually there were more emotional and personal arguments than any meaningful real responses. Finally, the original poster left the group, people who …more
Since times immemorial, ideas, objects and experiences of grand stature and lasting economic, social and emotional value have been created by men and women working together in teams. Granted that some extraordinary work in the fields of arts, philosophy and sciences was done by truly exceptional individuals, apparently working alone, …more
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDDO3ob-4ZY
Second part of my article on exploring how Little’s Law related to the Agile Project Management just got printed in PM World Today. Here is the abstract: Little’s Law[1] states that inventory in a process is the multiplication of throughput and the flow-time[2]. In first paper[3] of this two-part series, we took …more
My article by this title got published in PM World Today, Nov 2008 issue. Here is the abstract: Little’s Law states that inventory in a process is the multiplication of throughput and the flow-time. While this seems intuitive, it helps us establish a mathematical relationship between basic factors that govern …more
There was a question on the group Scrum Practitioners on LinkedIn if “…implementing Scrum as a whole should be our goal or would you use aspects of the Scrum methodology to realise an agile culture change ?†Looking at the disproportionately large number (with an increasing trend) of posts on …more
The Swiss Army manual says: When the map and the terrain disagree, trust the terrain. However, in software industry, there seems to be an unending effort to make sure the terrain is retrofitted so that it looks much more like the map in hand ! So, I have modified the …more
Test-Driven Development (TDD) is the new silver bullet in town. While several ‘obvious’ advantages are being cited in several articles, I fail to understand one simple fact: when we have not yet quite figured out how to develop good-quality software from requirement specs, how do you really use TDD to …more
Scrum offers a fresh approach of software development. However, the philosophy itself is not entirely new. It has been around in various disciplines for quite some time, and it is only now that the software community has woken up to it. I found an everyday example of my sonss full …more
 We had the second meeting of SAC last Sunday, 10-Aug. This time, we had five attendees, and except for Venkatesh and Tathagat, the other three came for their first meeting: Venkat (Philips/NXP), Bhaskar (Software AG) and Rafi (Alcatel-Lucent). As there were new members, we diligently invested a good amount of …more
