1. Dilbert
Scott Adams
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

2. Chapter 9 – Maintaining Project Rhythm
“Any project can develop a rhythm and then maintain it. The project manager (and project staff) has to look for obstacles and risks and remove them (that's the defense part)…
You're working someone else's project when they cut staff, change the delivery date, change the focus of the project, or some other major change, and then expect you to react -- and react well.
In my experience, once a project has started it's almost impossible to change the project rhythm from a top-down mandate and succeed with the project.
I have seen successes where people changed practices and were able to change the project rhythm.”
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

3. Continuous Integration
“Write some code, compile, test, review, build, run ‘smoke tests’, verifies changes have not broken the system, and checks the code base.”
Immediate feedback
Helps team find its rhythm
Staged integration… breaks rhythm as team members “context switch” to different phases.
The variant of Continuous Integration
“…branch off the main code base and have your developers do all their work on the branch.”
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

4. Create automated “smoke tests”
In software, the term smoke testing describes the process of validating code changes before the changes are checked into the product’s source tree.
After code reviews, smoke testing is the most cost effective method for identifying and fixing defects in software.
Smoke tests are designed to confirm that changes in the code function as expected and do not destabilize an entire build.
“The Project from Hell”, Computerworld
Keep the “build” working… don’t interrupt the rhythm.
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

5. Implement by feature – not architecture
By architecture … the focus is not on whole features.
Having lots of partially implemented features doesn’t give you the feedback you need.
Why?
“Nothing worked the way we expected it to work.”
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

6. Architecture Reflects Organization
Conway’s Law
Consider a large system S that the government wants to build.
The government hires company X to build system S.
Company X has three engineering groups, E1, E2, and E3 that participate in the project.
Conway's law suggests that it is likely that the resultant system will consist of 3 major subsystems (S1, S2, S3), each built by one of the engineering groups.
More importantly, the resultant interfaces between the subsystems (S1-S2, S1-S3, etc) will reflect the quality and nature of the real-world interpersonal communications between the respective engineering groups (E1-E2, E1-E3, etc).
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

7. Implement Highest-Value Features First
Leave the riskiest to later…
unless the riskiest is also the highest-valued feature!
Product Backlog
“The more valuable the features are and the more finished you can make those features, the more flexibility you have bought yourself and the team for this project.”
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

8. Pair programming http://www.pariprogramming.com
All code to be included in a production release is created by two people working together at a single computer.
Pair programming increases software quality without impacting time to deliver.
It is counter intuitive, but 2 people working at a single computer will add as much functionality as two working separately except that it will be much higher in quality.
With increased quality comes big savings later in the project.
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

9. Slide the key board and mouse back and forth.
The best way to pair program is to just sit side by side in front of the monitor.
Slide the key board and mouse back and forth.
One person types and thinks tactically about the method being created, while the other thinks strategically about how that method fits into the class.
It takes time to get used to pair programming so don't worry if it feels awkward at first.
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

10. Reviewing work Formal Inspection Buddy review Peer review Walkthrough
Reviews follow a similar structure:
Michael Fagan, Defect-Free Process
1. Planning
2. Overview
3. Preparation
4. Inspection Meeting
5. Process Improvement
6. Rework
7. Follow-up
Buddy review
Peer review
Walkthrough
Different types of
reviews
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

11. Plan to Refactor Simplify – improve – the code!
“ Refactoring is a disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior.
Its heart is a series of small behavior preserving transformations.
Each transformation (called a 'refactoring') does little, but a sequence of transformations can produce a significant restructuring. Since each refactoring is small, it's less likely to go wrong.
The system is also kept fully working after each small refactoring, reducing the chances that a system can get seriously broken during the restructuring.
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

12. Defining requirements…
“Think about who is using the system and how to develop what the user needs.”
Functional and Nonfunctional requirements are a developers abstraction.
Who wants that checking account? (page 178)
“… they had been focusing on the internals of the system that they had forgotten about the people who would use the system or be served by the system…
… It’s always the people, isn’t it?”
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

13. Use Low-Fidelity Prototyping
“Once you've learned paper prototyping, you can use it in every project you do for the rest of your career.
I have no idea what user interface technologies will be popular in twenty years, but I do know that I'll have to subject those designs to usability evaluation, and that paper prototyping will be a valuable technique for running early studies.”
Copyright © 2003 by Jakob Nielsen
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman