Whether your productivity is resting comfortably in a profit bearing zone or you are actively looking for bottlenecks and time sinks, process improvement should be a priority within your company. The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) certification process is all the rage this season, and with good reason. Created and… continue reading →

When estimating the effort of a project, the planning fallacy often causes a build-up of process overrun. Put simply, people always underestimate the amount of time they will take to complete work. Add to this the natural inclination to claim a better production standard than your lateral colleagues in front… continue reading →

As agile as we all want to be, projects invariably face time and budget constraints that must be worked around. Outside of the world of idealism and theory, the way that we prioritize solutions is essential to building deliverables that satisfy the requirements and the expectations of stakeholders. Since the… continue reading →

If you are trying to compete anywhere near the common man’s B2C product retail industry, the efficiency of your product management system should be a priority. The complexity of software development means that you have virtually endless potential for confusion without a proper system in place to ensure maximum efficiency and timely… continue reading →

Agile is the buzzword that everyone is talking about, and dev teams may get too caught up in replacing agile activities for hard results. Agile itself is continually improving its metrics, and companies have more opportunity than ever to apply only the metrics that achieve transformative results. When a dev team… continue reading →

The standalone metrics of past business generations are not relevant to most results oriented companies these days. End users do not concern themselves with scripts executed, errors discovered or total code lines written. These traditional metrics may mean something to the dev team, but it has no direct effect on customer… continue reading →

Great news for IT consultants: Agile is everywhere, and continuous integration may actually prove itself to be the media buzzword that actually increases efficiency when taken seriously! Recommend away. Moving forward into the fifth generation of computing led by AI and virtualization, Platform as a Service (PaaS) technology along with new… continue reading →

The four tenants of the Agile Manifesto are certainly a sexy quartet. Difficult to properly harmonize at times, but certainly helpful to companies looking to move forward in an accelerating technological environment. However, too many agile developers forget the sentence that the 2001 Utah ski lodge group placed right after… continue reading →

Media can report that employee acquisitions are “bullish,” but HR knows the truth. Hiring developers (especially the good ones) is going to be a slog using traditional methods. The best devs seem to be purposefully hiding from recruiters who employ a traditional process, and with good reason: A traditional process is usually linked to… continue reading →

All technical debt should ideally be eliminated; however, product iteration cycles END. Executives demand certain things on certain dates. These deadlines are a part of the coding process – there is a time component that works right alongside syntax, form, elegance and function, like it or not. No matter how… continue reading →