The Mindset

I have a confession: I am not the kind of person who wanders around the house looking for things to fix. Let me rephrase that: I am not the kind of person who fixes things around the house as soon as something breaks. OK, you’re on to me — I hate fixing things around the […]

“If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.”                                 George Bernard Shaw
Here’s a fictional scenario. It takes place in a project postmortem session. The product manager looks in his papers or dashboards and says something like “We had too many defects in this project”. The developers […]

Do you know the game “Rush Hour”? It is a great thinking game. Your goal is to navigate your car through the traffic jam and gridlock in order to successfully leave the game board. Of course this is not as simple as it might sound as you can see in this picture.
Looking at this picture, I […]

The term Multitasking originally referred to the ability to run two or more processes on one computer at the same time. This is usually achieved using a context switch mechanism, which means that each process is executed for a given period, and then replaced by a different process, while storing the state of the previous […]

The lexicographical definition of the word Priority is “Precedence, especially established by order of importance or urgency”. For years, tasks prioritization was successfully used for managing companies, projects and people.

At about the same time scientists first witnessed the hole in the Ozone layer, software developers around the world discovered a strange anomaly in the Priorities […]

Don’t you just love planning? Creating a fancy Gantt Chart, placing every task and every resource in its place. Feeling that you are in control, and that you have it all figured out. Then, you publish your plan, print the Gantt on a big poster and hang it where everyone can see what he or […]

When talking about quality, people often focus on exit criteria: the conditions that must be satisfied for a certain activity in the development process to end successfully. This tendency becomes more noticeable as you look at the development process from a higher perspective. Top-level managers, for example, are often concerned on the delivery date of […]

Are you in control of the projects you manage?
OK. Let’s start again with a simpler question: do you generally estimate the work that has to be done before you commit to a delivery date? Do you make sure you have the required resources and that they are available for your project before saying “I […]

Every now and then, I come across arguments such as the following:

“There is no sense in investing too much time in designing the product. It only has to be ‘good enough’”.
“We don’t have time for writing Unit Tests. This project is not that critical anyway.”
“Code Reviews? Too much effort for this project. The code doesn’t […]