Features developed within an iteration should be 100% complete. Too often in software development, “done” doesn’t really mean “DONE!”. It doesn’t mean tested. It doesn’t necessarily mean styled. And it certainly doesn’t usually mean accepted by the product owner. It simply means developed. Read more

Software Development evolves but timelines and cost should be fixed. Distinguish between “I Need”, and “I Wish”. This is in stark contrast to traditional software development projects, where one of the earliest goals is to capture all known requirements and baseline the scope of work so that any other changes are subject to change control. Read more

A powerful development team must include all the necessary members to make decisions, and make them on a timely basis. Every business has encountered the IT staff claiming “it’s not the hardware, it’s the software.” while the development team says, “it’s not the software it’s the hardware.” Meanwhile the owner and users say, “I don’t care, just make it work.” Read more

Software development is about frequent delivery of products and services. Gone are the days of the 12 month development project. If your software vendor isn’t releasing new features at least 4 times a year your falling behind. 3 to 6 month project delivery is not just strategic it’s necessary! Read more

In traditional software development projects, the life-cycle is Analyze, Develop, Test – first gathering all known requirements for the whole product, then developing all elements of the software, then testing that the entire product is fit for release. With successful software development, the cycle is Analyze, Develop, Test; Analyze, Develop, Test; and so on… doing each step for each feature, one feature at a time. Read more

The most difficult step in a development project is establishing the relationship between industry experts and the developers. Users should be directly involved in development projects. Particularly when the scope of development project includes product and services where the end users will be external customers or consumers. Read more

Apply just-in-time manufacturing principle to software development. A software development team should capture the requirements at a high level, as needed, just-in-time for each feature to be developed and deployed. In manufacturing you don’t want unnecessary parts cluttering your warehouse but also dont want to stop your assembly line because necessary components have not arrived. Read more

With software development, testing is integrated throughout the life-cycle. The software should be continuously throughout its development. Software development should not have a separate test phase. Developers should be more heavily engaged in testing and writing automated repeatable unit tests to validate their code. Read more

Pareto’s law is more commonly known as the 80/20 rule. The theory is about the law of distribution and how many things have a similar distribution curve. This means that typically 80% of your results may actually come from only 20% of your efforts! Read more