On Be(come)ing Agile: Using Scrum to apply Theory of Constraints. Object Technology Jeff Sutherland: Where GANTT Charts Should Be. PM Hut » Blog Archive » Schedule Questions: Pair Programming and. July 31, 2007 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Agile Project Management, Scheduling, Time Management Schedule Questions: Pair Programming and the PNR Curve By Mike Griffiths Converting effort estimates into project durations and team sizes is an important part of project planning.
How this is done varies from project manager to project manager, to some it is an art, others a science, and to many a case of living with everyday constraints. Today I will focus on the science and its implication to pair programming. If your initial project estimates indicate 72 person months of effort how do you best resource it?
1 person for 72 months? Intuitively we know that 1 person for 72 months might work (providing they had all the right skills) but typically business wants the benefits of a project as soon as possible. 72 people for 1 month is extremely unlikely to work, unless the project is simple and massively parallel, like cleaning oil off rocks on a beach. Tn = F * Effort ^ 0.33 The Agile Angle. Naresh Jain » Agile FAQs Blog » Managed Chaos » Agile (as practi. All Product Backlog and User Story Management Tools for Agile an. The Ideal Agile Workspace | Mike Cohn's Blog - Succeeding W. About Scrum. Manage people not tasks :: Comindwork, a better way to collabora.
Scrumy. Managing Software Development: Top 100 Blogs for Development Man. Note: The newest edition of this list is available here! Finally, it’s here! The new list I’ve been working on for more than two weeks! This is the top 100 most popular blogs for software development managers. You might already have seen my earlier list: the Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books, Ever. Well, I’m afraid this new list was even harder to make. Please refer to the bottom of the list for my list of complaints, and why my life sucks.
Do you seek more advice for Software Developers, Team Leaders & Development Managers? Get the book! Management 3.0 Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders About the NominationsOnly blogs that were nominated are present on this top 100 list. The idea of this list is to promote popular blogs that are interesting to software development managers. About StatisticsThe nominated blogs have been rated using five different statistics. No Feeds I wasted a lot of time trying to find a measure of the number of RSS/Atom feeds for each blog. Wait! Introducing Scrum At Large Animal Games: A Look Back at the Firs. Introducing Scrum At Large Animal Games: A Look Back at the First Year of Agile Development Large Animal Games has been in business in New York City since January 2001.
For the first several years, Large Animal developed games using informal, homegrown software development methods. "We did a lot of experimentation," says Wade Tinney, co-founder of Large Animal. To track project schedules, for example, teams at Large Animal tried using MS Excel, MS Project, FogBugz, and even tried different visualizations of the project schedule using Adobe Illustrator and Visio. Despite success with some of their practices, teams at Large Animal were still looking for improvements. Some of the things they tried had worked in theory, but felt forced. It was hard to motivate all team members to stick to some of these processes. More critically, Large Animal was finding it difficult to grow, since a set of key team members were needed in certain roles on every project.
The Impact of Scrum on the Organization. How To Implement Scrum In 10 Easy Steps. A Leaner Start: Reducing Team Setup Times. Face facts: Teams change I've worked with lots of teams in the past few years, some for very long periods, others for very short times. One common theme I've noticed with many of those teams is that the team composition always changes. Usually, events beyond the control of any project trigger these changes: people fall sick or take holidays, project demands grow, new project opportunities arise or people simply want a change. Agile practices, like daily stand up meetings and pair programming, provide new members with all kinds of incidental information which may in fact be useless if they don't have enough context to hang it on. Since agile practices don't directly address the learning needs of new team members, I suggest the use of other practices that specifically reduce the "setup time" for new team members.
Queuing theory applied to teams Apply the same concepts to teams and the addition of a new team member and you get something that looks like the diagram below. About the author. Scrum and Long Term Project Planning for Video Games. [The agile methodology known as Scrum is rapidly gaining development credence, and High Moon Studios CTO Clinton Keith (Darkwatch, The Bourne Conspiracy) presents this in-depth Gamasutra article explaining how publishers and developers can benefit through regular, focused iteration.] Scrum, an agile methodology, is emerging as a powerfully beneficial toolset for building games. The approach of finding the fun through iteration rather than trying to plan and predict it completely up front is appealing to many developers who have repeatedly been surprised by all the unanticipated problems and discoveries made on the path to creating a game.
One of the common misunderstandings of agile is that it avoids any long-term planning in favor of only planning a few weeks out. What agile does not do is support highly detailed long term plans up front. Agile methodologies, like Scrum, focus on continual planning for the entire range of the project. Adzic » The waterfall trap for “agile” projects. Jeff Patton from Thoughtworks held a very interesting session at XpDay last month in London, focusing on a common misconception that causes “agile” projects to fall into the same trap that the waterfall ones typically do. Incremental is not iterative Using a very interesting combination of pop music and rock star images, Jeff Patton told a story of a failed agile project in his XpDay keynote “Embrace Uncertainty”.
The project started off nicely, almost by the book, with customer involvement and stories split into iterations, based on what functionality is to be delivered in what release. After they got something delivered to play with, customers changed their minds (as they so often do) and new stories and features were introduced into the plan. The problem was that the concept of iterating had been lost and iterations were replaced by increments – making the project fall into the same trap as waterfall projects do.
Dealing with uncertainty However, iterative planning is harder to sell. The Future of Software Development. In 1975, Frederick Brooks wrote a classic book on software project management called The Mythical Man-Month. In the book, he famously argued that adding more people to a development project will hinder rather than help to get things done faster. The reason is that having more people working on the project introduces a non-linear overhead in communication. Five years before Brooks' book, a software development methodology called the Waterfall Model was coined. This approach applied the insights from mature engineering disciplines (mechanical, civil, etc.) to software.
The idea was to construct systems by first gathering requirements, then doing the design, then implementing it, then testing, and finally getting it out the door in one linear sequence. We have come a long way since then and learned a lot about making software. Why The Waterfall Model Failed Non-technical people tend to think that software is soft or easily changeable. The problem was that the Waterfall Model was arrogant. Your Trusted Source of Scrum Knowledge. Object Technology Jeff Sutherland: High Moon Wins Awards with Sc. High Moon produced a great video on Scrum.
Check it out! High Moon Studios, part of Vivendi Games, is a game developer currently working on titles for next-generation consoles. The company is founded by game veterans who are passionate about creating compelling, original entertainment experiences. High Moon is best known for Darkwatch (www.darkwatch.com), the hit console game based on original I.P. created by company founders. High Moon employs more than 100 people at a state-of-the-art game development facility based in San Diego County, California. High Moon's innovative development methods and employee programs have been recognized by the San Diego Society for Human Resource Management with a "2005 Workplace Excellence Award" and IT Week Magazine as one of "2005 Top 50 Technology Innovators.
" Object Technology Jeff Sutherland: Microsoft Vista: Scrum or Not. Peter Krantz rants on Scrum, Lies, and Red Tape at the Microsoft Vista project (see below). He's in Stockholm and I'm on a SAS flight over Greenland returning from two weeks in Sweden and Denmark doing several ScrumMaster Certification Classes. While Microsoft adopted Scrum on many programs large and small, I'm not aware of the Windows Vista team using it. Scrum is built on truth, transparency, and trust and was designed to emulate the productivity of the Borland Quattro project where the each developer delivered 1000 lines of quality production C++ code per week.
Vista only delivered 1000 lines per developer per year. Philip Su thinks Vista is the largest software project in the world and maybe the longest. However, Jim Coplien was in my Copenhagen ScrumMaster training last week and pointed out that he delivered weekly releases into a 100 million line code base deployed worldwide by ATT so that was at least twice as large as Vista.
Scrum, Lies, and Red Tape by Peter Krantz Vista. Object Technology Jeff Sutherland: Agile Performance Reviews. MEMO – June 1996 (updated Mar 1997 for IDX RISD, Feb 2000 for PatientKeeper, Nov 2006 for Scrum ) To: All Development Staff From: Jeff Sutherland VP Engineering, Individual SVP Engineering and CTO, IDX Systems CTO, PatientKeeper CEO, Scrum Inc. Chairman, Scrum Training Institute Subject: Performance Reviews There are a lot of reasons not to do performance appraisals. If you have to do performance appraisals, the attached review process was evolved during the first implementation of Scrum at Easel Corporation in 1993 and enhanced in several leading software companies. Allows the review to be a better means of communication with an employee. The Process Takes Three Meetings to Initialize Meeting 1: Reviewer meets with employee and goes over this document. The Review Ratings It is well known that employee performance ratings in all organizations are inflated.This process is designed to produce realistic, provably accurate, ratings.
Review Template Ongoing Reviews. Object Technology Jeff Sutherland: Agile 2007 Video Contest 1st. Gt; Future Technology > Empowering Product Development. Plan of Action. While I regularly change all other retrospective exercises, the action planning technique I’ve been using for the past two years has worked so well that I don’t want to change it. That has not always been the case. Action planning in my earlier retrospective often had some problems. Some of the action items were just good intentions without enough concrete details to make them actionable. These items focused on some longer-term goal that couldn’t be achieved during the next sprint. The result of this was that nothing actually happened. “Improve communication” is a good example for such an action.
Other action items had the opposite problem. Action Format To solve these problems, I ask the team to generate all actions in a specific format, as shown below. Long-term goal: Have test automation on acceptance-test level Now-Action: Pete will automate one test using Fit This format helps the team consider a long-term goal for every action. Action generation and prioritization Conclusion. Toyota’s green drive to the top - Times Online. Scrumming It. "Making games is hard. " - Microsoft XNA Product Unit Manager Boyd Multerer It's true: making games hard. When it comes to finding an effective management paradigm, the game industry is still young.
That youth is a double-edged sword: Game companies appear (and disappear) so rapidly that new methodologies can be fully implemented and tested in a short time-frame, leading to faster innovation and open-minded approach, while simultaneously insisting rebelliously that no previously described method from predecessor industries in either entertainment or software science could fully apply to game development. They just don't understand us, man! To some extent this is true. Game development, especially at the AAA level, mixes some of the most difficult elements of software design and development with the uncertainty and volatile creativity that drives every other entertainment business.
By 1988, teams expanded; Sierra's had 17 names on its credits, many appearing more than once. Good Agile, Bad Agile. When I was growing up, cholesterol used to be bad for you. It was easy to remember. Fat, bad. Cholesterol bad. Salt, bad. Everything, bad. Nowadays, though, they differentiate between "good" cholesterol and "bad" cholesterol, as if we're supposed to be able to distinguish them somehow. And it was weird when they switched it up on us, because it was as if the FDA had suddenly issued a press release announcing that there are, in fact, two kinds of rat poison: Good Rat Poison and Bad Rat Poison, and you should eat a lot of the Good kind, and none of the Bad kind, and definitely not mix them up or anything.
You know. But I've had a lot of opportunity to observe various flavors of Agile-ism in action lately, and I now think I was only about 90% right. And you can attend my seminar on it for the low, low price of $499.95! No, just kidding. I'll just go right ahead and tell you about the Good Kind, free of charge. The Bad Kind Thank goodness that doesn't happen at your company, eh now? Yeah.