Brent Sordyl's blog

Small teams beat large teams in software development | Atomic Spin

January 12, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

To complete projects of 100,000 equivalent source lines of code (a measure of the size of the project) they found the large teams took 8.92 months, and the small teams took 9.12 months. In other words, the large teams just barely (by a week or so) beat the small teams in finishing the project!

Given that the large teams averaged 32 people and the small teams averaged 4 people, the cost of completing the project a week sooner with the large team is extraordinary: the large teams would have spent $1.8M while the small teams only spent $245k

(Full Story: Small teams beat large teams in software development | Atomic Spin)

agile, projectmanagement

Your IT Project may be riskier than you think

November 2, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

The lessons learned from this successful project were to:
1. Stick to schedule
2. Resist changes to the projects scope
3. Break the project into discrete modules
4. Assemble the right team
5. Prevent turnover among team members
6. Frame the initiative as a business endeavor, not a technical one
7. Focus on a single target – readiness to go live, measuring every activity against it.

(Full Story: Your IT Project may be riskier than you think)

projectmanagement

No More Projects – Chad Fowler

April 22, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Projects are lovely for procrastinators. As soon as you call something a project, you give it permission to not be completed right now.
Events such as the Rails Rumble have shown that it’s possible to finish software projects in two days that might take a corporate development team weeks or months in a normal project scenario. What’s the difference? Do the Rails Rumble participants throw quality out the window? Do their apps suck? Do they avoid testing and cut corners? Yea, sometimes. But so do most corporate development groups. That’s how things are.

(Full Story: No More Projects – Chad Fowler)

projectmanagement