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we have a number of functional deliverable planned for 2010 but we also have a technology agenda (architectural refactorings, consolidation, upgrade a platform). any suggestions on the best way to include these in a roadmap to help the business understand why they are important.
one option is just saying trust us as this is the right thing to do to keep everything healthy but i would like some better visualization if possible
Being a bit cynical about it, I would say phrase every thing in terms of money. If you can't re-write your technical agenda in terms of money made or money saved, then why are you doing it at all?
Also, there is an article on "technical debt in financial terms" that I found very useful at:
http://forums.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2007/11/01/technical-debt-2.aspx
One of the more interesting points, to me, is "One of the important implications of technical debt is that it must be serviced, i.e., once you incur a debt there will be interest charges."
There is a brief follow up at
http://forums.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2007/12/12/technical-debt-decision-making.aspx
Show how support time, time between failures, number of problems should go up if you won't do the change.
Each technology has it's time limits, end of support from the manufacture, and regular life cycle.
Example - if you use MFC - you can show that programming a simple task in MFC is 3 times slower than in winforms. so after x months, the benefit from not upgrading will be lost.
with equipment it is even easier, as the older the equipment gets, the more mal-functions there are and it is easy to show (usually after the 3 years covarage everything starts to break, and I think it's planned like this. it didn't use to be but these days it does).
with infrastructure - again - if you have oracle 7.6 - show how much more time (money) you spend on administration and how less will be spent in 11g.
ect. ect. ect.
eventually manager wants to see ROI... TCO... BLA BLA BLA so you need to give them that.
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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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I am currently trying to make the transition from a technical PM to a Developer.
Obviously this depends very much on current level of knowledge / experience, but are there some key things that a PM (who also codes regularly) might have missed from not strictly working as a Developer.
Also would a course like this help in the right direction?
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/computing/teaching/postgraduate/msc-computing-science/description
Considering I want to work on Audio/Video/3D ideally, I feel this course could be a good leg up?
As a technical PM you have the advantage of knowing the terminology etc so that is at least a heads start. As to making the switch check out information on areas such as
computing fundamentals - low level concepts on computer hardware, network and protocols.
algorithms - for an understanding of sorting, graphs, networks, trees, etc.
architecture and design - web application architecture, messaging architecture, UML, use cases, documentation.
programming languages - OO, scripting and AI (at least to get a feel for the types and applications)
business end of programming - software estimation
This is a broad spectrum of areas that you would need to have at least some exposure to for the transition. In fact it might even be useful if your current employer allowed you to work as the developer on a small part of a project. You'd certainly gain respect from the developers on a project coming from the technical PM role and could even enlighten the developers.
If you have a passion for working in an area, seriously consider the amount of creative freedom, in your experience, developers have as compared to PMs. Make sure that's acceptable to you.
Nothing is worse than having passion in an area, but little or no influence.
As far as technical abilities go, the only thing to do is to code. Any classes primarily will act as ways to ensure that you do so, and do so in ways that will teach you. But at the end of the day, it's going to boil down to time spent writing software.
If you really want to become a great developer, learn at least one language radically different from the languages you know. If you're a Java/C++/C# kind of guy, learn something that will really torque your brain like Haskell, Erlang, or Scheme. To just learn really good OO techniques, learn, read, and write some Smalltalk.
The best thing to do is to spend ten years or so programming during every waking moment. That's what worked for me!
First of all get start practicing to type all day ! Then get ready to work on minute details which a developer works on everyday like... code shortcuts, coding styles, commenting etc.
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What are your opinions (as users as well as developers) on begware that e.g. at the start screen or intermittently shows a modal dialog for x seconds? What about other methods of getting the user to pay (or send you a postcard or any other kind of appreciation) instead of using the trail version?
Nagware is a bit pointless Imo, any thing you do to limit the software so that the "free" version is somehow encumbered will ultimately lead to it being reverse engineered and people will just download the out dated and possibly virus infected alternative of your software, which although not your doing, makes your software look bad.
I know this isn't viable for all software types, but whats nice is to just give up that fight, and give your software away for free, and then find other circumstances that make you money from the software.
Dual License, Free for Private/Non-Profit use, Licensed for Corporations/Companies.
Charge for consumable releated services , ie:
Support
Subscription to online service ( many games do this )
Aferro GPL: Anybody can use it but must share their source to all people using it. People wanting to not share have to contribute a licensing fee.
Many ideas just have different payoff rates, the "give it away" and then collect funds on related services may sound like it will never help you, but being free gets it out there faster, and then its a numbers game as to when you'll have a large enough base to fuel the other services.
( The contra-idea is having a product that costs millions, you sell once, and it doesn't spread because of the high cost )
As a user, it's annoying, but I don't feel I have any right to complain. If I don't like it, I can either pay for the software or use something else.
As a shareware developer, I don't use it - I prefer making the free version crippled or time-limited.
I really don't find they actually accomplish that much. I've gone on using things like WinZip, without paying for a license, for years, watching it count up all 1000 days I've been using it, simply because I didn't think the price they were asking was worth not seeing the nag screen. If the person doesn't want to buy your program, showing them a nag screen won't give them any extra incentive to buy it.