Tagged Questions

Planning is the process of thinking about and organizing the activities required to achieve a desired goal.

learn more… | top users | synonyms

27
votes
9answers
1k views

Writing my problem solving approach on paper?

I'm a freshman Computer Science student and we just started doing some actual projects in Python. I have found out that by using the pen and paper method my professor suggested in class I'm very ...
1
vote
1answer
87 views

Inventory / Stock in multiple locations

I am working on a warehouse management system (WMS) that needs to support having stock in multiple locations. Could be in a different building, could be stored in n* places in a building (quick ...
2
votes
1answer
102 views

How much should we spend on improving software security?

Is there a "scientific" method to determine how much resources/money should be spent on improving the security of a piece of software? I work in a team where our work is prioritized by a product ...
0
votes
2answers
115 views

estimation method at the “just finished definition phase”

We are basically using Waterfall life cycle methodology. Requirement Analysis: I get a use case created by some one else. Design (talking only about Low level design): I get some little feeling about ...
0
votes
2answers
294 views

Choosing the right language for the job

I'm currently working for a company on the engineering team of about 5-6 people and have been given the job of heading up the redesign of an embedded system tester. We've decided the general ...
1
vote
1answer
128 views

How does one start mocking up a mobile app?

I have this idea for the "best app in the world". I know what it's going to do, the need it's going to fill, a high to mid-level idea of the code, and who i'm going to target. Now i'm ready to begin: ...
6
votes
3answers
256 views

Task Planning on an Agile Team

At the beginning of each sprint our team will pull in a handful of user stories and then, one by one, write slightly more detailed tasks for them as well as assign specific hours to each task. ...
3
votes
3answers
291 views

Working alone on a project

So I am working on a small Project at my company, I am a mere trainee engineer (halfway through a Software Engineering degree), where we are developing an intranet - based project management and ...
0
votes
1answer
203 views

What stage of development do activity network diagrams belong to?

Activity network diagrams are used to determine the forward and backward paths for a project, and consequently to determine the critical path or maximum time to development. I'm already familiar ...
0
votes
1answer
170 views

Planning poker, individual or whole group in estimates?

In planning poker/scrum poker, when an estimate is made, should the estimate be made based on the assumption that only a single developer is assigned to that task, or a group of developers? If the ...
3
votes
3answers
1k views

Test planning for an Agile sprint

Can anyone offer any tips or experience on developing a test plan for an Agile sprint? Most of the time our team simply creates a "Test Feature X" task and goes about writing ad-hoc test cases. There ...
18
votes
1answer
304 views

Has research been done on the effectiveness of Planning Poker as an estimation technique?

Although it is a commonly held opinion that planning poker improves the accuracy of project estimations (a small sample of which demonstrated on this question), has any defined research been done on ...
-1
votes
2answers
413 views

How to organize projects in Redmine? [closed]

I deployed a Redmine installation yesterday and today I try to fill it with some relevant data. One issue I came across is the organization of projects itself. While I took a look at how Redmine ...
6
votes
3answers
293 views

Should I fix small issues or let them go? [closed]

I ran into the following issue where a keyboard shortcut I was used to was no longer working in Ubuntu. That's just an example. For programming, this kinds of thing happens a lot, but it also happens ...
0
votes
1answer
220 views

What are the best practices and strategies for transferring an outsourced software development project in-house? [closed]

What are the best methods of knowledge transfer? What kinds of documentation should be expected? What activities should take place before and after handover, both by the external party and ...
3
votes
2answers
338 views

How can I discourage the use of Access? [closed]

Lets pretend that a very large company (revenue numbers with more than 8 figures) is looking to do a refresh on a software system, particularly the dashboard used by employees. This system was ...
3
votes
3answers
220 views

What to do when there are no logical user stories but separate development tasks?

We need to generate a release in 3 weeks, and for the planning we are doing today we don't have coherent logical user stories from the backlog tasks. Is valid to match say each development task is ...
0
votes
3answers
148 views

Numerous Unexpected Obstacles Ruining any Project Plans [closed]

I am working as software developer and struggling with this problem time and time again for almost thirteen years. There seems not to be any way out of the following problem. And it happens with ...
3
votes
7answers
394 views

Is it a bug or a task when something doesn't work, yet, in development process

We usually have this dilemma in our team. Sometimes, in order to implement a task or a story we find out that the system must be in a specific state. For example, a specific system configuration has ...
2
votes
2answers
246 views

What is the process of planning software called? Or what is the job title of someone who does software planning?

For example, let's say a non-technical person comes to me with their rough initial specification. And I sit down with them over a couple weeks and help them hone, formalize and better plan the ...
1
vote
1answer
163 views

Metrics / Methodology for estimating resource utilization for software in planning stage

I'm looking for approaches to estimate the resource utilization of an (web-)application in a JEE environment. The overall target is to get a forecast for hardware/software requirements while the ...
0
votes
2answers
148 views

How many tasks to plan beforehand [closed]

As for my daily routine. Every morning when I come to work, I look at the items of my todo-list inbox (noted from the previous day). For each task I think about on which day I should get started and ...
3
votes
6answers
342 views

Finishing an iteration early

I'd like some input on this on those working with agile methodologies... A current project is finding that development on our planned user stories is finishing some time before the end of the ...
5
votes
3answers
428 views

What should be the minimal design/scope documentation before development begins?

I am a junior developer working on my own in the programming aspect of projects. I am given a png file with 5-6 of the pages designed, most times in specific detail. From this I'm asked to develop ...
1
vote
3answers
149 views

Methods for systematically researching technologies to use in a project?

If I want to recommend a technology/plugin/library to my company for use in a project, are there any methodologies I can use that will produce more reliable results and a more convincing presentation ...
12
votes
5answers
659 views

How should I create a mutable, varied jtree with arbitrary/generic category nodes?

Please note: I don't want coding help here, I'm on Programmers for a reason. I want to improve my program planning/writing skills not (just) my understanding of Java. I'm trying to figure out how to ...
4
votes
1answer
337 views

Release roadmap with scrum

I need to prepare an internal product release road-map for product being built via scrum methodology, and have some difficulty correlating sprints to the road-map. The main problem is that as I don't ...
15
votes
5answers
3k views

Scrum - how to carry over a partially complete User Story to the next Sprint without skewing the backlog

We're using Scrum and occasionally find that we can't quite finish a User Story in the sprint in which it was planned. In true Scrum style, we ship the software anyway and consider including the User ...
-2
votes
3answers
910 views

Private Wiki vs Google Doc to share specifications for a team?

My team is debating whether to put the specifications on a private wiki or in a google document. Can someone provide me with a summarized list of pros/cons for using a private wiki vs google docs ...
3
votes
4answers
606 views

Planning milestones and time

I was hired by a marketing company a year ago initially for link building / SEO stuff, but I'm actually a Web developer and took the job just in desperation to have one (I'm still quite young and just ...
3
votes
3answers
468 views

Getting overwhelmed after starting a new project

I started a project (a Windows based timetable program that helps you stay organised with your subjects and assignments). The problem is that I'm not sure how I should manage this project and what ...
27
votes
5answers
1k views

Are there any actual case studies on rewrites of software success/failure rates?

I've seen multiple posts about rewrites of applications being bad, people's experiences about it here on Programmers, and an article I've ready by Joel Spolsky on the subject, but no hard evidence or ...
2
votes
3answers
561 views

How to make hardware sizing sheet?

We build some software platform, and now we need to make hardware sizing sheet for the server-side piece of this software. So, I should prepare some mathematical model that, for example, given the ...
1
vote
5answers
229 views

Process of developing software? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: What to plan before starting development on a project? I was wondering when you start developing a software what process should you generally go through to do it? By ...
0
votes
2answers
166 views

Planning Development Projects

We are currently re-evaluating the way we manage, plan and run our projects (an area that I think we can massively improve upon) so I just wanted to get some ideas as to how other development teams go ...
0
votes
4answers
310 views

How do you estimate? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: How to respond when you are asked for an estimate? What are the estimation methods you use in real world projects and found it to be useful. I know there will be lot of ...
3
votes
4answers
506 views

How do you determine velocity when the previous sprint was half User Stories and half Defects?

The following scenario often happens with my team at the office. Let's say we decided to plan our Sprint this way: 50% new features 50% bug fixing (they are high priority AND unestimated as the ...
7
votes
6answers
1k views

How can I justify a technology over another? (Java over .NET)

We are working in a Java/.NET company and my team and I are planning a project for a client. One of the requirements is that the project has to be done in .NET I've asked about this requirement, ...
7
votes
5answers
777 views

How to account for a bug fixing iteration?

We have implemented Scrum quite successfully for the past 5 months. Though, we are 3 weeks away from PROD without ever doing any end-to-end integration test. OUCH! I need help. Without tackling the ...
4
votes
7answers
425 views

How to decrease errors before testing?

During last year, several of the projects of the company where I work failed. We develop web software, that are not especially complicated (the most are CRUDS and search form about this data). One ...
7
votes
3answers
1k views

How to handle 'external' dependencies in scrum?

If you've planned a number of user stories for a sprint and one candidate story is dependent on some external provider delivering something to your team. For example an online service provider adding ...
9
votes
4answers
494 views

Planning Poker and wordy developers

My team is composed of 4 developers; all seasoned and skilled. One of them is a wordy, well intended chap who insists on defining the technical solution to our stories before we put down our estimates ...
12
votes
6answers
626 views

Tips for planning a rewrite of a large PHP project?

I've decided to completely rewrite a PHP framework (Using MVC) that I've been working on, on and off, for years. My problem up until now was that I would just come up with ideas, throw them into Trac ...
7
votes
4answers
3k views

How long should a sprint planning meeting last?

In your experience, how long should a planning meeting (SCRUM) last? 8 hours? Or should it be shorter (succinct) and further discussions should be planned as part of the sprint (10 days sprint)?
3
votes
2answers
356 views

Which development methodology for a solo programmer on a 1 month project?

I've been tasked with a solo project to investigate & resolve memory leaks in 8000 lines of Javascript code. I anticipate the project to take up to a month. Please recommend a development ...
3
votes
4answers
123 views

Website Planning Help

There are a lot of posts on this but I'm kinda looking for specific help, I've typed many different queries into Google but the majority of page returns seem to be dominated by beginner tutorials, ...
3
votes
3answers
189 views

How to best approach planning and budgeting of software performance optimization efforts?

There is a software system that has been with the client for some time now. If is feature-rich, mature, complex enterprise application that client uses in production. Due to the rapid expansion of the ...
5
votes
1answer
289 views

Any good planning tool or method for managing several competing projects?

I look for a tool or a "best practice" whose focus is on managing how the current staff of programmers can get assigned and re-assigned to different projects depending on changing priorities. Progress ...
44
votes
15answers
2k views

Should I plan ahead, or figure out programs as I'm writing them? [duplicate]

I was thinking today about Paul Graham's book "Hackers and Painters." More specifically, these two paragraphs: "I was taught in college that one ought to figure out a program completely on paper ...
5
votes
3answers
168 views

Develop on the lastest and greatest or stick with the well documented version?

Should I develop on the latest and greatest 1.7 version of Joomla or stick with the well documented version of 1.5? I'm new to Joomla (and webDev in general), so I bumble around, search online, and ...

1 2