Blog
ScopeMaster Approved by ESDC Canada
PRESS RELEASE Marlow, UK. July 12, 2022 Employment and Social Development Canada adopts ScopeMaster® for More Certain Digital Projects After a period of investigation and assessment, the ESDC has now approved use of ScopeMaster® (intelligent requirements analyser) to help improve the quality and sizing of requirements for their digital portfolio. ESDC and The Need for Quality Requirements The ESDC has an extensive plan for the rollout of digital solutions and is turning to ScopeMaster® to help get their digital projects off to a healthy start. Large digital/software projects need good quality requirements in order to be successful. But establishing good clear requirements [...]
Artificial intelligence in project management – APM Report 2022
Read the attached report which combines expert interviews and a substantial survey about the potential The use of AI in Project Management is just beginning new, yet it can become a powerful tool to help nearly all project managers become more successful. Artificial Intelligence helps with decision making, something which PMs have to deal with constantly. The questions that one might start with are: How can it help project mangers?, what areas will be most reliable?, how can biases be minimised? and where can I start to try it out? The Association for Project Management – APM commissioned a Phd study [...]
Planning Software Projects Successfully
We all aspire that our software projects are delivered on time and budget*. Software is complex and unless we plan for success, it is unlikely to “just happen”. When Planning Software Projects, fortunately we have the experience of past failures from which we can learn. We should embrace the learnings from these mistakes so that our projects can avoid the “pathological” route. What do we mean by a project being late? Lateness is really about a project being delivered late in relation to expectations, or in other words late vs the estimate. To avoid disappointment we need to create realistic expectations [...]
Ron Jeffries Update on ScopeMaster and COSMIC Sizing
Ron Jeffries is one of the three founders of the Extreme Programming software development methodology circa 1996, along with Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham. He is also a co-signatory of the Agile Manifesto. A few weeks ago he set us a challenge to estimate some requirements for a game that he is working on. We rose to the challenge and presented him with some examples based on his own current work, see the previous post here After a couple of enjoyable conversations with Ron, he wrote his views, and experience in this readable blog post: https://ronjeffries.com/articles/-z022/0222ff/est-cosmic=other/ 5 minute read. Here are some selected extracts [...]
Ron Jeffries Estimation Challenge
Estimating Features for A Software Game Ron Jeffries posed a software estimation challenge to determine the likely effort required to deliver a forthcoming featureset of a game that he and his team are writing. I decided to take up this challenge and carry out a COSMIC sizing estimate, and perhaps in doing so, will turn some heads towards the merits of CFP estimation and how it can help with design-thinking. We are asked to estimate the effort required to design some functionality within a partially built game, here is the high level requirement: Provide the ability for a Level Design Team Member to [...]
Backlog refinement – automated
Backlog Refinement Backlog refinement is the activity of preparing work items for your software team to work on. Your backlog of user stories, developer tasks and epic ideas is the queue of potential work items to work on in upcoming weeks (sprints). To keep a steady flow of work for the team, a list of refined backlog items should be ready for the team to start working on at any time. There should be slightly more ready and prioritised than the team needs for the upcoming few sprints. What does Backlog Refinement Mean? Backlog Refinement (aka backlog grooming) means working on the [...]