Victor’s Blog on Software Development Practices

One of the main tenets of the Agile methodologies, exemplified in the Agile manifesto, is “people and communication over process and tools”. Thus, one is led to believe that Agility is not a process, but some kind of overarching, magical recipe that has the power, by itself, to guarantee success.
Some who subscribe to this extreme [...]

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It’s a question that often gets asked and puzzles even the top managers of many consulting companies.
If you are going “Agile”, how to go about negotiating contracts? Aren’t “fixed bids” fundamentally incompatible with Agile? If so, then how can you handle potential clients who want a number to be quoted?
It turns out there are a [...]

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This is quoted with permission from Joseph Little
In the course of my work, I hear people talk about how hard is to get things done in organizations. (This happened again recently.)
And I know from personal experience too, it is hard.
But I wanted to emphasize that organizational politics is not as hard as we make it [...]

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According to the Standish report, “User Involvement” has been ranked as the number-one factor in software projects success. The following is the complete list of factors found to significantly impact success:

User Involvement
Executive Management Support
Clear Business Objectives
Optimizing Scope
Agile Process
Project Manager Expertise
Financial Management
Skilled Resources
Formal Methodology
Standard Tools and Infrastructure

(Source http://www.infoq.com/articles/Interview-Johnson-Standish-CHAOS)
How to achieve an optimal user involvement?
First [...]

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