Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reality Driven Development: Fixing Project Management in Software

brightball.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–147 of 147 posts

Re: Reality Driven Development: Fixing Project Management in Software

#141

Post by gaius »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #140
gaius wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony being that XP and the like are only suited to cookie-cutter, commoditised work that is essentially risk-free anyway

I couldn't disagree with this statement more. On projects that are breaking new ground it is even more important to follow XP practices like getting frequent feedback from customers, taking the simplest solution that could possibly work to avoid overengineering before you actually understand the problem, to embrace change because your original understanding of the problem probably isn't right. There also is plenty of…

Those kinds of projects fail all the time.

... because they use snake oil methodology like XP...

Re: Reality Driven Development: Fixing Project Management in Software

#142

Post by brightball »

erikb wrote: post #120
brightball wrote: post #2

Author here if anybody has any questions.

Please don't put out assumptions like "PM = Psychology + Economics" without an indepth argument about it. I completely disagree with such statements and without arguments I can't even attempt to see it your way.

I apologize for not responding to this sooner. I just missed it.

Project Management is about resource optimization, where for the case we're talking about those resources are people.

Optimizing those resources involves balancing the supply and demand for people's hours, knowledge and skills. More experienced and highly capable people on your team will be in more demand, despite the always limited supply of their hours which increases the cost of those hours to your timeline.

Psychology is the study of human behavior. Because the resources are people, a huge portion of your job in optimizing that timeline is optimizing the people. That means understanding motivations, weaknesses, burn out, focus, etc as well as a number of other factors.

Re: Reality Driven Development: Fixing Project Management in Software

#143

Post by brightball »

erikb wrote: post #115

What a ride. I really disagree with almost everything that's written there. So many things are even factually wrong, or with such a limited perspective that they are very likely missing the point. For instance, what he describes is not project management (limited timeframe, specific end result) but constant, ongoing product development. He describes a development management job (might also be called team lead), not a…

I can respect your view there.

I only briefly touched on the re-prioritization (I usually describe it as triage) with the brief scenario of a production issue or cross-team communication once a commitment has been made in scrum. Maybe in another post.

Re: Reality Driven Development: Fixing Project Management in Software

#144

Post by [deleted] »

dangoor wrote: post #136
tboyd47 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! Loved the article. I am currently employed as a scrum master in a scrum environment. About your proposed "fix" to management: even with the light pairing you recommend, wouldn't kanban eventually cause siloing? Even using scrum at my job, we have individuals becoming the "Feature X" guy or the "Feature Y" guy. This person then essentially disappears into a hole perfecting that one feature for weeks/months, even…

When using kanban, people take the first card from the top of the pile and work on that. There's no siloing in that, because you're taking whatever happens to be at the top. You don't estimate in kanban. You'll generally try to break things down into small stories, but the goal is to always be working on the most important thing and focus on improving how quickly work goes from idea to done.

[deleted]

Re: Reality Driven Development: Fixing Project Management in Software

#145

Post by piccolbo »

ebiester wrote: post #60
icebraining wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agile methodologies are weird. They seem to go directly against the manifesto, particularly "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools"[1]. Yet Scrum was created by two of the manifesto signatories. Still, a lack of a strict methodology doesn't necessarily make it waterfall. [1] http://agilemanifesto.org/

SCRUM predates agile. Though SCRUM has had many changes over the years, the manifesto was responding to problems of the day; that is, a giant statement of work up front, hundreds of pages of design documents, a giant build process where everyone figures out what the product really should do in engineering while product forgets about it except for occasional questions. Then, that whole steaming pile was thrown over th…

Please one element of evidence that scrum predates agile.

Re: Reality Driven Development: Fixing Project Management in Software

#146

Post by piccolbo »

ironjunkie wrote: post #106
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #48

There's a lot here. People have been writing books about this for decades. Two things that need to be succinctly said: 1. Project Management is just another skill , like database management, security, or any one of a hundred other skills a tech team might have. PMs keep trying to take themselves out of the trenches and claim a special place. Every time they do that it is a mistake. 2. He touches on "waterfall" a few…

This hits home. Wy too many times I have been at places where the Project Manager is seen as the "Boss" or the gatekeeper by management and by himself. Engineer usually disrespect the project manager as they don't really understand anything and just do stuff based on an Excel sheet.

That's unavoidable. He's called manager for a reason. I would replace powerpoint for excel in my experience. Everyone wants a leader they can look up to and admire, not a PM.

Re: Reality Driven Development: Fixing Project Management in Software

#147

Post by LloydPickering »

piccolbo wrote: post #145
ebiester wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SCRUM predates agile. Though SCRUM has had many changes over the years, the manifesto was responding to problems of the day; that is, a giant statement of work up front, hundreds of pages of design documents, a giant build process where everyone figures out what the product really should do in engineering while product forgets about it except for occasional questions. Then, that whole steaming pile was thrown over th…

Please one element of evidence that scrum predates agile.

If you're happy to accept the Manifesto in 2001 as the start of agile, then https://www.scrum.org/about under 'Creating Scrum' states "Jeff Sutherland and I had been using Scrum for ten years prior to the meeting at Snowbird where we and others signed the Agile Manifesto"
Post reply on HN