The Latest

How does personality impact the implementation of industry Standards and Frameworks? It would seem that following the guidance in the IEEE 828 CM Planning standard is simply a matter of writing CM Plans and documenting your existing CM practices. The fact is that some people implement Standards and Frameworks successfully and others fail miserably. This article presents a popular and highly regarded psychology framework that will help you better understand how to implement Configuration Management.

I once attended a presentation by an executive who began by saying, “I want to get through the initial slides so we can get to the interesting stuff.”

How would you react to this remark if you were in his audience?

Karl Scotland explains that viewing kanban as a systemic approach leads to systems thinking. Systems can be thought of as being made up of elements, which interact to meet a purpose. They are more than the sum of the parts, and the system’s purpose is crucial in determining the system’s behavior.

Although many companies may have heard that the concepts of lean production would be of use to their organization, they do not see how something that sprang from manufacturing practices could apply to software development. This article presents a different way of looking at Lean Software Development—one that is independent of Lean’s manufacturing heritage.

In October this year Codeworks DEV received the 2010 Agile Award for the “Best Use of Agile in the Public Sector”. The use of Agile Methods within large, publically accountable environments has long represented a challenge to the Agile community. Agility is more often associated with small to medium size enterprises (SME’s) in the private sector, where organisations are incentivised to keep pace with a changing business environment. Public sector companies and larger corporates, on the other hand, are renowned for their essentially prescriptive, “non-agile” attempts at long-term planning using techniques such as PRINCE2.

My team is in the middle of one of the hardest projects—we call them "themes"—we’ve ever tackled. We’re a high-functioning agile team that has helped our company grow and succeed over several years now—we “went agile” in 2003. Here’s one thing I know for sure: No matter how many problems you solve, new challenges will pop up.

Tired of guesstimating your estimation process just to create a completion date management will accept? Jonathan Kohl takes the guess work out of estimations by focusing on uncertainties. It may sound counterintuitive, but the idea is to focus on the fact that all projects face unforeseen delays. The rigorous estimation process Jonathan describes here provides your team a way that ensures enough time is scheduled for development and a date for completion management can agree upon.