You may very well not need a spec for your software project. I had a recent conversation with a friend in a very small (3-4 person) company, building their first online product, and he said his sole developer was going off to write a spec. This raised alarm bells with me, as I saw it … Continue reading
A few words on rewriting and migrating systems, based on experience. This is because the painful rejuvination of Delicious under Avos is very much at the front of my mind right now — I’m both a user caught in the backwash, and also an industry professional who’s dealt with these things before. While Chad and … Continue reading
Is it possible to estimate a software project well if it’s over, say, a month in duration? Or can you only give meaningful estimates to work that’s less than a week? And is it right to say No to any requests for estimates of work of substantial size? These are questions that arose most recently … Continue reading
Lots of questions went unanswered in my last piece on putting ranges of projections into project proposals and I want to follow up on one of them here: What if our range of values isn’t something we’re happy with? In my previous example our project had a revenue projection of £150k to £500k. But suppose … Continue reading
Reading Doug Hubbard’s excellent How to Measure Anything I got thinking about the proposals I read and write, the problems they face, and how to fix them. A typical proposal (I’m thinking mainly of internal projects) will make a claim like “This project will add 500,000 unique users in the first year” or “This will … Continue reading
Today I attended the launch of something weird and wonderful: a new musical instrument, the Eigenharp. And although this is a hardware device the event, and the run up to it, brought to mind the launch of our own Open Platform six months ago. By seeing some commonalities between the two it gave me a … Continue reading
…which are important even on an Agile project. Many people who read just a little about Agile development think there are no fixed commitments. It’s true that there is constant reprioritisation of work, but that generally operates at the task level, and there is still a need to set goals and stick to them. After … Continue reading
At the weekend the Guardian website went through one of the most significant transformations in its history: we moved our news, politics and Observer content into the new design and new content management system, and we simultaneously launched a lot of new functionality, both internal and external. There’s an introduction and discussion on the more … Continue reading
Late last night (UK time) the Times Online launched their new design, and jolly nice it is, too. It’s clean and spacious, and there’s an interview with the designers who are very excited about the introduction of lime green into the logo. Personally, I like the columnists’ pictures beside their pull-quotes. That’s a nice touch. … Continue reading
There’s a post from Joel O’Software regarding measuring performance and productivity. He’s saying some good stuff about how these metrics don’t work, but I’d like to balance it with a few further words in favour of metrics generally. Individual productivity metrics don’t work, but some metrics are still useful, including team metrics which you might … Continue reading
