Acceptance Test Criteria: Gaining a Shared Project Understanding
We have several activities that add layers of quality to our software development projects. These activities include unit tests, sprint code reviews, and test plans. Recently, we added another quality layer to our process: acceptance test criteria. This new step occurs at the development story level before any coding begins. The goal is to ensure…
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Project Management – How We Do It
Project management is how software companies manage their various overlapping development efforts while building great software. Likewise, a project manager oversees those efforts. Taking notes, tracking progress, recording milestones, and holding meetings are just a few tasks project managers handle every day. At Don’t Panic Labs, that’s been my role for nearly five years and…
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Project Management – Retrospectives and Values
This is the fifth and final part of my series explaining how Don’t Panic Labs approaches project management through the lens of a software release cycle. The release is out the door. Now it’s time to reflect on the work that’s been accomplished in the past weeks or months. It’s time for a retrospective. We…
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Project Management – Iteration Planning and Daily Standups
This is the fourth part of my series explaining how Don’t Panic Labs approaches project management through the lens of a software release cycle. At this point we have our items identified, estimated, and ordered for the release. It’s now time to schedule our iterations. We generally use one week iterations, which we’ve found to…
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Project Management – How We Estimate
This is the third part of my series explaining how Don’t Panic Labs approaches project management through the lens of a software release cycle. We’ve just finished up initial release planning and have given Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) estimates to each work item. We came up with a way of estimating that’s worked well…
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Project Management – Release Planning
This is the second part of my series explaining how Don’t Panic Labs approaches project management through the lens of a software release cycle. How we approach release planning varies, but for this post I’ll focus a common approach we use: Themed Release Cycles. When we begin talking about an upcoming release, we look to…
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Project Management – An Introduction to How We Do It
Project management is a job that I find challenging and fulfilling, especially when one considers the various methodologies and philosophies that exist around managing software development projects. There’s no “one way” to approach project management. We have many tools in our toolbox and evaluate each project to determine how best to approach it. It’s part…
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