One of the benefits of agile, at least in theory, is the single product owner. In conventional projects we can have many people in the position of the product sponsor or product owner.  These multiple voices can provide contradictions in which our product development team must wade through to determine the real requirements.  Experience indicates […]

Business Imperative There was a discussion going on LinkedIn and Twitter about technical debt, and management decisions. Sometimes business imperative trumps technical debt, but you must acknowledge the technical debt, and compare the business positives against the technical debt negatives. Technical Debt We should probably start by giving a definition of technical debt.  Technical debt […]

Project Management Tools and Risk Management There still remains meat on the bones of this study from Software Advice.  On LinkedIn, Joe Hessmiller had an observation that Client relationship and Risk management was far down on the list of concerns. Under the heading More Buyers Request Advanced Functionality Than Basic[1] client management and risk management was […]

Why do we use tools? We use tools to make our lives better. It would not be very fun to hammer a nail into wood with our hand.   Imagine the situation if we continued communicate via pony express. Sometimes, when we are not aware a tool exists, we may try to fabricate something.  We make […]

Testing and Repeat-ability  Repeat-ability of testing results is important to establishing cause and corrective actions. If it is not possible to repeat the sequence of events leading to a failure, it is not possible to replicate and therefore difficult solve the cause of the fault or failure.  The steps that evoked the problem are necessary […]

    Early Reviews Just finished reading Configuration Management: Theory, Practice and Application, and I must say this is the most comprehensive document I have ever read on the subject. It addresses theory, practice, and application, with many real-world examples of what happens when the principles of product/configuration management are not followed! —Bill Dawson, SVP […]

Concurrent engineering problem take many forms From our last blog, we have learned that of an organization that has concurrent engineering difficulty, specifically coordinating the design work.  We will further explore this situation.  One of the subsystem groups decides to improve the coordination effort internal to that specific department. For example, System 1 chooses to […]