Open Agile, November 2 2011, Bucharest, Romania

Published October 13th, 2011 Under Conferences | Leave a Comment

The Methods & Tools Magazine is proud to be a media sponsor of the Open Agile Romania. In early November, Jurgen Appelo, Methods & Tools’ author and writer of the book Management 3.0, David Hussman and Alexandru Bolboaca will speak at the third annual Romanian Agile & Lean conference in Bucharest. The theme is “Build A Great Team”. You will leave from this conference with enough ideas to help you improve team work at least for another year. There will be an open space session, lighting talks and an opportunity for networking with agile lean practitioners. Find out more on Open Agile Romania on www.openagile.ro

Software Linkopedia October 2011

Published October 12th, 2011 Under Links | Leave a Comment

Web site: The Handbook of Software Architecture

Blog: Metrics for Agile

Blog: Improving our interview process

Blog: Pitfalls of the Stand-up Meeting

Blog: Transforming to Collaborative Agile Teams

Article: Moneyball for Software Engineering

Article: Functional Testing with Arquillian

Article: Tracking Software Projects from a Financial Perspective

Article: Reflections on Virtual Teams

Tool: scrumblr- simple open source scrum board

Tool: Jubula Functional Testing with Eclipse

Video: Overcoming Self-Organization Blocks

Video: Javascript Testing at Google

Video: Compositional CRUD for SOA

Find more interesting links on the software development resources directory, the software development tools directory, the software development articles directory, the software development blogs aggregator or the software development videos directory.

What is a Successful Software Project?

Published September 28th, 2011 Under Software Development | Leave a Comment

Recently somebody asked on a forum “when is Scrum not working?” This lead me to the question “when is a project successful?” Traditionally, you can measure the success of a project by checking the respect of the scope, schedule and budget at the delivery of the application. In this situation, the burden is more on project managers and developers: they have to estimate the user requests and deliver on these estimates. This requires the mostly complete definition of the requirements at the beginning of project. Every change is the subject to negotiation as it could cause a change in either the budget or the schedule. In this situation, people might be more judging the capacity of people to estimate… or better to protect themselves from unexpected problems. I am sure that many of you have heard: “Take your initial estimate and multiply them by two before communicating them to your project manager or end-user”. A more business-oriented definition of a successful project is based on the delivery of value, the faster the better. In this case, the success of a project could normally be assessed only after the delivery of the application, assessing its return on investment (ROI). The concept of business value might be also implicitly present in the traditional project approach, but its mindset is more strictly focused on the project management results than the creation of value. Read more

Retrospectives, Standards, User Experience and HTML5 in the Fall 2011 issue of Methods & Tools

Published September 20th, 2011 Under Methods & Tools | Leave a Comment

Methods & Tools – the free magazine for software developers, testers and project managers – has just published its Fall 2011 issue with the following articles that focuses mainly on user interface and project management practices:
* Dialogue Sheets for Scrum Retrospectives – Helping Scrum Improvement
* Using Models and Standards – Tools for Software Processes
* The Psychology of UX – Understand your Users
* HTML5 for Rich Web Enterprise Applications – What Does HTML5 Brings to the Web?
* Gradle – a revolutionary Groovy based build tool
* Saros – an Eclipse plug-in for Distributed Programming
* StarUML – an Open Source UML tool