Jiri’s Notepad

Walker Royce: Successful software management style: Steering and balance:

Writing books and papers about methods and patterns and techniques, which the industry calls thought leadership, is relatively easy. However, most of us are not looking for best thoughts, we are looking for best practices. Managing real projects requires practice leadership where applying and executing these ideas under game conditions is relatively difficult. We need to cherish proven project managers who understand practice leadership: They are probably the scarcest resource in every company….

Software project experience has shown time and again that the early phases make or break a project. This is why a small, highly competent start-up team should handle the planning and architecture phases. If these early phases are done right, projects can be completed successfully, with teams of average competency evolving the applications into the final product. If the planning and architecture phases are not performed adequately, all the expert programmers and testers in the world probably will not achieve success over the course of the later phases.

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Driving integration test first accelerates the resolution of architecturally significant issues into earlier phases of the life cycle.