Three monks have no water to drink

 “Three monks have no water to drink” is a proverb with the story about three monks.

In the beginning, the first monk living in the temple alone high up on the mountain has to walk down the temple to carry his own water everyday. 

Later on, a second monk arrived and together, they walked down to carry their daily water consumption. 

At last, a third monk arrived and in the end, none of them would walk down the mountain to carry the water up. What is the result of this? Well, in the end, the three monks ended up having no water to drink.

The mystery word OR

Tell a kids:

"Either you OR her will get the candy.  "
"You OR her need to clean up the mess"

What will happen next?

Test Failure and Test Blocker

Test Blocker

Blocking QA from testing may just require a small code fix or may just need a fix to the QA env configuration.

It affects the QA testing and affects the QA testing schedule and productivity.  Unblocking QA is critical and needs to be treated as an urgent issue.

Notes and Tips about Jira

New product or project development:

1. Create a new JIRA project

You need to have the project administration permission to do so.
In an organization, this permission will not be granted to many people.

You can give it a key.  The key will be prefix of issues number for issues created in the project.
You can give it a unique icon, call Avatar.

A JIRA project is sometime mapped to "Product" within software organizations.  A new product may be a "project", but when you have multiple releases and start maintenance cycles, you are developing and maintaining a product which is typically created as a JIRA project.

2. Create a Board

For a new development project, a new broad can be created for an existing JIRA project, or for a JQL, which is a query for collecting issues from multiple projects.

This is a very good way to run an "integration" project, when a project involves the teams that are from multiple product and from multiple organizations.

You can create multiple boards.  Multiple boards can exist simultaneously.  A board is actually just a view of the issues in different columns.

Review: Aha

Aha demonstrates how a cloud apps works.  It is a requirement tracking software.  It has the integration to JIRA.

It manages the lifecycle before the requirements come to development in JIRA as a user story.



Releases are created for managing the target delivery for a specific deadline.  A release has a start date and an end date.
 https://support.aha.io/hc/en-us/articles/201226575

Releases are draw in a Gantt chart, called Releases Roadmap. The visualization using a Gantt chart is very powerful tool.  
https://support.aha.io/hc/en-us/articles/115001477463

Master Features are created as containers of user stories.
https://support.aha.io/hc/en-us/articles/115001477463

Master Features are added to Releases.  Or more specifically, User stories from master features are added to releases.  When you view the user stories, you can optionally view the major features of that release, before drilling into the details to view individual user stories.

Daily Standup

I attended my first standup meeting in my new company.

Task Management

Five good tips:

1. Use a software for tracking tasks

Defining the Scope

Defining the scope is about defining what you are going to do.

"Knowing what you need to do" is different from "defining what you are going to do".

When defining what you are going to do, you are considering your constraints, such as resource availability and time.

Some examples of Sprint Burndowns

Sprint Burndown Chart is a tool for the team to help the team focus.







I found this video helpful.

Project Initiation - Project Charter

During the project initiation phase, a project charter can help facilitate the initialization process.

In the past, we have been asked to write such document and schedule the review with the stakeholders, before we kick off a project.

It describes what a project looks like and what resources needed, and how big the project will be.   It identifies the interim or final deliverables expected from the project.

I feel that this process is still important.  It is kind of like writing a contract.  People need to agree with the term and conditions before start working on the project.

For the internal software development projects, the quantified dollar values and the costs may not need to be tracked, but it is still helpful to write down the resource requirements and the business values the project may produce so people know why we do a project.

The system we are using for tracking the software projects can be used for tracking the project initiation as well.

Here are the information we need to enter:

CMR - Change Management Request

Change Management is part of the project management discipline to control the changes.

Change Management process is an important way to avoid the Scope Creep.
Sometime, people are not aware of the impact of a "small" change to the overall schedule or the quality of the product.  The formal change management process can help management and stakeholders realize that nothing is free.

Change management is not just for managing scope.

Managing a Programming Project

I found this book in a library used book sales.

http://amzn.com/0135507723

This book first published in 1973 and the book I got is the 1981 version.

This book is still relevant.

It describe the SDLC as six phases:

ETA

ETA = estimated time available

It is given for updating the progress.  The information is mainly for the consumer or for the people who are in charge of the downstream process.

What is the ETA?  This question is asking when the task will complete?

Accept 360

This is a software for requirement management.

We use it for project management.

Release Exit Criteria

This is a check list to show the release readiness.

This is similar to the phase gate in the project lifecycle.

Some people also define the "Entry Criteria" to indicate when a phase can start.

Here are some samples:

Project Manager, Development Manager, and Work breakdown structure

A person who is good at the execution will know the importance of creating work breakdown structure (WBS).

A good executor makes things happen, or get things done (GTD).  A good executor not just come up idea and plans, but know "how to" make thing happen.  They also know what the WBS looks like.

Fixed barrack, floating soldiers

I read a good article. It is written in Chinese

铁打的营盘流水的兵  

This sentence's original meaning was "Soldiers come soldiers go, the military camps stay fortified." In military, soldiers typically stayed for a fixed period, such as two years.  However, there are regular missions and work have to done, and cannot be stopped.

Reporting structure

This is how I view this.

It helps people to focus. It it also let that people can think of the bigger pictures.

Each layer handles the problems at different levels and sometime in different ways.

Some levels can just handle integration issues. not the details.

The issue between bigger groups can be handled with the synergy.

Software Development Project Management

Software projects have some additional project management requirements. It uses some management tools which may not be commonly used in other type of projects.

Here are some terms:

Software Release: It can be represented as a number. The historical projects are associated with a release that is already available to the customer. Otherwise, projects are associated with a release that is currently actively being worked or a future release.

Staffing: The project management for all different types of projects need to have the staffing function. Some typical roles involved in the software development projects are Dev, QA, Doc, Performance, and Product Management. When it comes to the stage of planning, a another common seen categorization is in-shore, off-shore, and near shore.

Primavera P6 and E-Business Suite

Today I received an alert about the Project Portfolio Integration Pack for Primavera P6 and E-Business Suite.

Here is the link to the Data Sheet:
http://www.oracle.com/applications/aia-pip-fin-project-mgmt-p6-ebs-data-sheet.pdf
http://www.oracle.com/ocom/groups/public/@ocompublic/documents/webcontent/039439.pdf

I am excited to see the integration scenarios we identified several year back now come true.

It looks like the solution working for both Financial and Workplan, just like the feature Oracle Projects had provided for several years with Microsoft Project. However, the integration with Primavera is more flexible. You can choose to create projects in either directions.

Also, there are bi-directional integration between project budgets.