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Leaving work at my contractual end of play time seems to be a rare event. Usually work has to be done that requires working an hour over the end of the day, or a meeting (time differences are a real pain).
Is there anything I can do to avoid this? I already make sure I don't start a task in for the end of the day (or the end of the next day), which I cannot finish within that time.
Is this a sign of bad project management? Also, how do Project Managers handle time zones (they are a real inconvenience)?
Thanks
Is there anything I can do to avoid
this?
Sure, leave on time. Task not done? Start on it when you arrive on time the next working day.
Manager doesn't like this? That's his (or her) problem. Scheduling tasks, assigning priorities, and managing resources is the managers job. Doing your tasks to the best of your ability within the contractually agreed upon working hours is your job.
Constantly asking you to stay late or work on weekends or holidays is either poor management or lack of company resources (not enough people to do the job). Requiring you to stay beyond the statutory limit without paying overtime is a violation of labor laws.
(Of course this assumes you are an hourly employee.)
It could be that they simply don't have enough people on the job, and there's too much in the role you're doing for one person to get through in a day. That said, I find that I'll often get engaged with something at work, not notice the time, and end up leaving somewhat late. This is more that I'm enjoying it at a given moment, than it is to do with that extra time being strictly necessary. I think this is something that you need to ask yourself about. Is more being asked of you than you can get done in your contract hours? If so, why? Do you really enjoy what you do, and spend time trying to do it as well as possible?
On the time zones thing, they are a nightmare. Sometimes you need to have a conversation with someone who wakes up not long before you want to head home, and someone's going to have to take the awkward time (or more usually, a compromise must be reached). There's no perfect answer to this, since someone is always going to have to be available at a time they rather wouldn't. I think the most important thing is to ensure it's at the least inconvenient time for all parties involved.
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a customer asks for response times under a second for all "dialog-based" applications. He is speaking about our desktop applications that are getting the data from a business server connected to a SQL Server.
Usually 1 second is ok for us, but we have got some forms that will take longer (up to 2 or 3 seconds). Do you know any standards (or any source) that specifies what should be the response times for a user? I've found many different informations, but mostly for Web pages and not for desktop applications.
I read somewhere that 3 seconds is the "magical" number. Then I read about the "10 seconds rule" from Norman Nielsen for web pages. Some others speak about the "4 seconds" rule.
I would like to have some arguments for my customer from some "third party" ("as you probably know, the accepted limit is specified in the ISO norm as xx") :-)
Thank you
Even if the actual performance of your dialogs can not be improved, you can look at techniques which may improve the perceived performance of the application. Lazy loading, or asynchronously loading parts of the dialog after it's shown may improve the experience for the user and not require exceptional effort from you. Feedback on progress, may also improve the user's experience. You may want to test out some ideas with some users, even just a couple, to see what they perceive as the problem, and then look at techniques to address those specific issues.
Since you mentioned Nielsen Norman...
Some quotes from here: (about websites) (gives a bit more context to "the 10 second 'rule'")
From 1–10 seconds, users definitely feel at the mercy of the computer and wish it was faster, but they can handle it.
A 10-second delay will often make users leave a site immediately. And even if they stay, it's harder for them to understand what's going on, making it less likely that they'll succeed in any difficult tasks.
Even a few seconds' delay is enough to create an unpleasant user experience.
And this (for web and application) also mentions 10 seconds, but it only says you should give an estimated duration if it's taking longer. It also says "response times should be as fast as possible".
What you should take from this:
These are advised numbers to be taken as upper limits. Users generally aren't happy with response times that approach these, but will be willing to accept them occasionally (not consistently).
A one second response time is really not too much to ask for, in general. But, if you have a few dialogs taking longer, this should be acceptable.
If the response time absolutely cannot be improved any more and the client isn't happy, the only remaining thing you can do is to give some of the technicalities in laymans terms as justification for the response time. For example, the server isn't good enough to handle the program, or the network connection is to slow, or whatever. I don't think any client will really be happy being quoted some specification they've never heard of, even if one existed.
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I'm in my first development job out of college and have been handed a (solo) project that is completely outside the range of my skills/experience both in terms of the technologies being used and the sheer scope of the thing.
I've spent the last 6 months or so basically completely retraining myself and then starting to do the thing, and although I did very well at college and I think that I'm on track for delivery, I've had zero feedback on what I've been doing and I'm suddenly starting to feel very much out of my depth.
My direct supervisor, while a nice guy and I think a competent coder, doesn't have the best communication skills and basically told me to "read a book" when I asked him for a bit of guidance, which is not really what I was hoping for!
Am I just being unrealistic about the amount of support I can expect as a junior developer? It seems to me that ignoring the issue and ploughing ahead runs the risk of a failed project which is to no-ones benefit. I could take my request for guidance a step higher to the head of development, but I don't want to sound like I'm saying I can't do the job nor do I want to make my supervisor look bad.
Can anyone suggest a good approach for saying "help!" without making myself or my supervisor look bad?
This is a great question, and I think a fairly common situation. Basically, I think what you're asking for is guidance on how to communicate with your boss, and the other people in your organization.
This might be a good time to look into the scrum framework, and take from it what seems applicable to your environment.
In particular, you mention that you might be in over your head. Or, there is an (implicit) expectation that you'll need to finish this project "tomorrow," when you really don't know how long it will take.
I suggest starting with a list. Write down everything you need to do. Include non-coding activities, like "research technology X for doing Y," and give each task a basic time estimate like "1" for short, "2" for medium, "3" for long. Then put the things in an order that you think makes sense.
Then meet with your boss, once a week, for like 20 minutes, to discuss what you did, and what you're going to do next week. Out of this discussion, you'll both see what's going on, and adjust expectations (and the list) accordingly. When conflicts of expectation come up, talk it out.
Regarding the amount of support to expect as a junior developer, this really depends on your organization, and your supervisor's opinion. As software engineering is still a relatively young profession, there isn't much in the way of industry-standard mentoring programs.
I suggest trying the list + meeting thing for a couple months, and observe how your opinion of the support situation changes. Then, go to a large conference as soon as possible; spend the money if you need to. You'll see who is struggling with similar situations, and also who is not, and you'll create your own, more-informed model of "how the industry is supposed to work."
Regarding a good approach to communicating, I (seriously) suggest The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman, which has a lot of examples of what works and doesn't work when communicating with people.
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While doing planning sessions using Rapid Board what are some reasonable ways to make sure each person on the team has a decent enough amount of work for the length of the sprint?
e.g. if you have 10 people on the team, how can you quickly see if 1 person only has 2 hours worth of work? Are you supposed to wait for them to speak up or can this be done through Greenhopper somehow?
The best way to make sure that everybody has work to do throughout the sprint, is to let them sign up for work every time they complete the previous task. This means that the members will be "pulling" work, rather than having their work "pushed" onto them.
If you conduct a daily scrum - daily - you will find out pretty quickly that someone is not signing up for new work - that he's either stuck on what he has, or not picking new work. Essentially, if you break up your work into small enough tasks, you will know what is going on within a day.
All this will work for you regardless of which software tool you use to track your sprint.
If you are using Jira, (and your project can afford it) I would suggest looking into the add-on "Green Hopper." It is also made by Atlassian and does a lot of what you are asking for. You can view individuals and see how much work they have as well as how much free time is remaining.
You can also drag the stories (Jira issues represented as virtual index cards) into different iterations (sprints) and onto different people. As well, it will help you to run your daily standup (using it as the scrum board), however YMMV.
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I work for a web development company, and quite often, some of our projects come back from the client after being released, with small bugs.
This frustrates my boss as it means we must carry out development work to fix the issue, for which we are not getting paid for.
How can we prevent errors from ever occuring, or is this just something that should be taken into the initial cost?
Our philosophy, time versus money applies to your circumstance as well. The more time that is spent on unit testing, the less likely it is that code will contain bugs after it is released. At the same time, the more time your spend unit testing the less profitable the code is.
We take a more cavalier approach. Our programmers test their own code, pass it off to a fellow programmer for testing, and then a final review and unit test is performed by a supervisor. If all three tests pass, the code is stamped complete and is passed on the end users.
Bugs are an inherent part of programming and must be anticipated as inevitable. No amount of testing can truly guarantee that code is 100% bug free.
Some good methods of avoiding writing bugs are found at this site.
http://sites.google.com/site/yacoset/Home/how-to-avoid-writing-bugs
Released software will always contain some bugs, even the big companies like MS, Google and apple can't release without bugs. Ofc you can do lots of thing to prevent it, like unit testing, smoke testingen, stress testuing ect. ect., but there will always be bugs. thats as certain as rain when you'r on holiday in England.
Make sure you discuss stuff like this in the sell proces. For example 3 weeks aftercare(bugs fixed for free), after that the can buy maintaince hours
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When working on a project - I always estimate my tasks and calculate how long it will take me to finish. So in the end I get a time-span in which the project should be finished (it rarely is).
My question is - do you record your data and assumptions use in your estimates during a project and use them for later projects or refined estimates on the same project?
If so - how do you record such data and how do you store them?
I used an excel-sheet - but somehow (cannot imagine how that happened ;)) I tend to forget to fill in new assumptions or gained information. On the other hand it is not really readable or useful for evaluating my predictions after finishing the project - to learn from it for the next project.
Sounds like what Joel wrote FogBugz for.
I had a discussion with a friend recently about a pragmatic variation of this, more specifically, the feasiblity of using the coarse level evidence of when code is checked in.
Provided you work in a reasonably cohesive manner, your checkins can be related, at least through the files involved, to some work units and the elapsed time used to determine an average productivity.
This fits well with the Evidence-based Scheduling approach included in FogBugz. If you happen to have been spending time on other things to an unusual degree, then in future you will be more productive than the checkin rate suggests. Any error is on the safe side of over-allocating time.
The main flaw, for me, in an approach like this is that I typically interweave at least two projects, often more, in different repositories and languages. I would need to pull the details together and make a rough allocation of relative time between them to achieve the same thing. In a more focused team, I think repository date stamps may be good enough.
Isn't that what project managers are for? ;)