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The Evolution of the DevOps Quality Management Office DevOps is evolving, and as teams adopt it, they will need increased continuous quality along with continuous delivery. The DevOps quality management office is a a set of processes, tools, and competencies to drive testing efficiencies in DevOps initiatives, which will accelerate quality delivery. |
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“So, How’s It Going?” Thoughts on Reporting Project Progress People near the top of your org chart often want project status updates to be short and sweet. But oversimplified measures risk miscommunication. Be thoughtful when someone asks, “So, how’s it going?” If you summarize too much, you can lose context, and these managers may feel misled later. |
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The Abstraction Problem As technical people, when we give too much information in a project status meeting, we can overwhelm managers. Worse, if we don’t answer the implied question ("When is this thing going to be done?"), the managers will get answers elsewhere. Read on for ideas to get you speaking the same language. |
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Take a More Agile Approach to Problem Solving Your managers want you to estimate features or projects months or even years in advance. But the work changes—or the code changes, or the people on the project change. What you thought might be a reasonable estimate four weeks ago looks wacko when you revisit it in six months. What can you do? |
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Estimate Effort Based on Past Performance How often have you estimated how long it would take to complete a task, only to be off by a whole week? That's because we assume we will begin the task immediately and have a forty-hour week to work on it. There's a better way: prediction based on performance. Just find a batch size for your work. |
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A Tale of Two Projects Large IT projects are challenging. Complexity is hard to estimate well. Big systems are tough to implement. But when you're staring at a fast-approaching deadline and you know your system will not be functional in time to meet it, there are ways of handling the situation that are better than others. |
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Stop Making the Same Mistakes We keep changing the names of the development processes we use, but we do not fix the fundamental error they all suffer from: the failure to set a date and control the scope of the project—including proper estimation of testing efforts. Customers and IT must work together to truly be successful. |
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How Management Indecision Loses Money and Hurts Your Project Portfolio When managers can’t decide which projects to undertake, they end up making a decision—to not decide. They don’t fund the potentially transformative projects; they go with the safe bets. The difference between when a project goes on the backlog and when it's started eats into your maximum revenue. |
