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The High Cost of Employee Turnover among Project Managers Nothing can be more frustrating for a business manager than having to deal with employee turnover. High or low, it is detrimental to your organization. The reality is that the demand for experienced project managers is on the rise, yet less experienced personnel seem to be attracted to the profession. This is part of the reason why project managers are not always effective at their job--they simply are not properly trained in the field. While turnover among project managers is a serious problem, it simply goes undetected in many organizations. Most CEO's and managers accept it as part of the cost of doing business. But successful managers recognize the staggering costs that turnover can have and try to work to lower it as much as possible. This informative article covers the many potential causes for turnover among project managers, how to cope with it, measure it, and hopefully decrease it over time. |
Thomas J. Mattus
July 1, 2005 |
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Free Time is Not Free Unpaid overtime has negative personal and business consequences. Although regarded as free time by many organizations, there is a true business cost to not estimating or counting overtime hours, whether paid or not. Ed Weller presents the argument that those who do not count free time in their planning and tracking will make poor decisions and often invest in the wrong projects. |
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Ping-Pong Programming: Enhance Your TDD and Pair Programming Practices Team player Dave Hoover wants to share a software development practice he enjoys. It emerged from the practices of extreme programming as a competitive yet simultaneously collaborative practice. Dave has found that this practice promotes the flow of knowledge between software developers better than any other practice he has experienced. As you might have guessed from the title of this week's column, this practice is called ping-pong programming, or P3 for short. |
Dave Hoover
May 31, 2005 |
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Cook until Done There's no shortage of advice on how you should model, design, test, build, and deploy your software project. Every author, trainer, and pundit will swear up and down that "they know the secret." They know how to build great software—they've done it before and all you have to do is follow their lead. Buy their software, read their books, buy their tools, attend their seminars, and do it just like they do it and you'll be a success, right? But somehow it doesn't seem to be that easy. In this column, the first in a series of articles that will explore the different avenues of software development, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, the Pragmatic Programmers, begin the journey by revealing that learning software development isn't as easy as the pros make it out to seem. Find out why these books and seminars work for them, but not always for the rest of us. |
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The Goldilocks Parable: How Much Process Is Just Right Getting process improvement "just right" is difficult. Go too far in the definition of processes, and it really does get too hot, with the heat coming from the people trying to use the processes. On the other hand process definitions that are too short to contain anything of value will leave users in the cold, and then there will be no improvement in the organization. Ed Weller states that a useful process improvement activity develops a set of process artifacts that meets the needs of the user. This helps the organization capture "tribal lore" and cast it into a set of process definitions that eliminates waste and improves time-to-market. |
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The GNU Make Standard Library The GMSL contains functions for list and string manipulation, has a complete integer arithmetic library, and functions for data structures: there are GNU Make implementations of associative arrays and stacks. There are also built-in debugging facilities. |
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Suffering for Success One of the most valuable services a QA group provides is preventing failure. Ironically if the group succeeds at this, QA might find themselves unpopular or out of a job. Linda Hayes reveals how typical methods of measuring success can actually cause failure. Especially if success is achieved at the loser's expense. |
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Building an Independent Test Group Are you attempting to start an independent test group or increase the scope and value of your present group? After building a highly effective thirty-person test group, Scott Eder reflects on the three major areas where he focused and the challenges he faced along the way. Take away sample work scope and purpose statements for your test group, and learn how to set realistic expectations at all levels within your organization. Find out the key processes that Scott implemented immediately to get his team off to a good start.
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Scott Eder
January 31, 2005 |
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Test-Driven Development Isn't Testing There's a common misconception that test-driven development is a testing technique when in fact it's a design technique. In this column, Jeff Patton explains this and how you might use your unit tests to explicitly guide and describe the design of your software. |
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TimeLine Postmortems We should use project postmortems to improve our software process. But few teams do, and fewer teams reliably learn from project postmortems. You can introduce postmortems to your team easily with a timeline postmortem process. If you are already doing postmortems, a timeline-based approach may improve your results.
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Seth Morris
January 9, 2005 |
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