Tag: project management

Eight Rules for Effective Software Production

Timofey Nevolin wrote an excellent article “Eight Rules for Effective Software Production” over at Toptal.com.  The whole thing is well worth a read, but here are the 8 rules to get you started:

  1. Understand the IT Mentality
  2. Do Not Mix Software Production and Development Methodologies
  3. Use Persistent Storage as an Extension to Human Memory
  4. Stop Wasting Time on Formal Time Estimation
  5. Understand the Cost of Switching Tasks and Juggling Priorities
  6. Use Architecture Reviews as a Way to Improve System Design
  7. Value Team Players
  8. Focus on Teamwork Organization

All of these are good and true, but if I had to pick one, I’d say that rule 4 is my personal favorite.  Sometimes I feel like I’ve spent a good quarter of my life in meetings, discussions, and other estimation sessions.  And looking back at all of them, I have to honestly say that they all of them were a waste of time.  The only useful part of an estimation session is a high-level project plan, but that can be achieved with a project planning session – much narrower goal, much more measurable, and much easier to achieve.

Software Engineering at Google

Fergus Henderson, who has been a software engineer at Google for 10 years, published the PDF document entitled “Software Engineering at Google“, where he collects and describes key software engineering practices the company is using.

It covers the following:

  • software development – version control, build system, code review, testing, bug tracking, programming languages, debugging and profiling tools, release engineering, launch approval, post-mortems, and frequent rewrites.
  • project management – 20% time, objectives and key results (OKRs), project approval, and corporate reorganizations.
  • people management – roles, facilities, training, transfers, performance appraisal and rewards.

Some of these practices are widely known, some not so much.  There are not a lot of details, but the overall summaries should provide enough food for thought for anyone who works in the software development company or is involved in management.

 

What is ChatOps? A guide to its evolution, adoption & significance

HipChat blog runs a rather lengthy post on what ChatOps are – “What is ChatOps? A guide to its evolution, adoption & significance“, which provides some insight into how the new generation of teams communicate.

At Qobo, we are at Stage 3 – Gimini, with a whole lot of dedicated rooms (one for each project, and a few more), some workflows (most notably “Hey Leonid, can you merge and deploy this pull request please“, or a shorter “@leonid, please m&d”), and some automation (we get monitoring notifications from Nagios and Zabbix, repository activities from GitHub and BitBucket, as well as do project deployments using slash commands).

We haven’t eliminated email completely, but combined with Redmine project management tool, we’ve significantly decreased the role of unstructured emails in our work.