Wayne Allen's Blog

Tom DeMarco, arguably one of the key thinkers when it comes to how we develop software has been reflecting. My early metrics book, Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement, and Estimation (Prentice Hall/Yourdon Press, 1982), played a rol… more »

Jack Milunksy of Brightspark and AgileBuddy was reacting to a Agile Project Management forum topic on metrics. Jack was of the opinion that: the more one spends time tracking metrics, the less time there is for development While I have some symp… more »

The situation: Things have been slow for a year. Next year isn't looking any better. Not that this is a unique experience. The company is generally fine, but with everything on a downward trend we want to stay healthy financially. My budget is abou… more »

Jeffrey Phillips wrote a nice post on Accountable for production not attendance. In it he argues that most knowledge workers should be treated like virtual workers – they should be held accountable for their production, not their attendance. The implicat… more »

One of my staff (Aaron) found this great post from David Bock called the 7 Question Project Health Check. The only thing I'd add is start working on this today! If you want to know why, start adding up the cost of not doing it. How long will it take… more »

In my initial post No More Iterations I mentioned that estimating was a factor in the change we were making. Specifically: Story size was difficult to estimate and kept crossing iteration boundaries. The programmers really didn't see the value of e… more »

We've committed to iteration-less pull based software development starting on Monday for one of my teams. A number of factors led up to this decision, not to mention the vast amount of discussion I had with my project managers. The factors: Stor… more »

As my team becomes more responsive to the business needs placed upon it I realize that I haven't clearly communicated the guidelines I'd like to see in place and why I believe the guidelines are helpful. Here is a recent clarification I sent out (modifie… more »

I had never read "The Deadline" by DeMarco, but it turned up on my boss' desk one day and I borrowed it. I thought it was an enjoyable read and only violently disagreed with his attempt to say that if we would just do more up-front design everything wou… more »

the spurious pundit has a really good post on how hard it is for manager types to do a good job of telling people what they want done. Snippets: First off, there's the mechanics of how to do it. What tools does he need? You know that there's a hammer… more »