Project Dune now stable...

Project Dune went stable yesterday. It still needs a detailed customization guide and a user's guide to be really complete, but the main beef is there for people to use and to provide feedback on.

The next steps for this project are aimed at separate modules for SCRUM project management and document management. Naturally, those modules will have certain breakout points as well to allow integration with Project Dune.

The project itself will slow down in new features and aims to resolve issues that the user community will (or should) raise. Then with some more stability under it, we can take it to other levels later on.

MS Vista vs. Linux source code control...

MS Vista has been delayed a couple of times and this is often attributed to different factors. This article shows how Windows did the version management. Check it out:

You have a very large number of branches that sometimes need to be integrated. The whole point of these branches is to establish "quality control exit gates", where the code will not pass upstream unless it passes the quality control check. This is a nice thought and that part might work, but there is another consideration for quality to be made here... immediate synchronization with other code. Now, the person writing this article is convinced that without this level of "management", nothing will ever ship.

Consider the Linux kernel. There is basically one mailing list and one mailing list only. There exists an idea of "separation of expertise", but not really "separation of concern or by branch". This does not mean that branches are not used, but they are temporary. The only longer-lived branches are kernel version branches (2.2, 2.4, 2.6), so you have different streams there.

The mailing list is considered total chaos (if you live up to MS terms). Everybody has access to every comment, even if they don't work on it and comments on everything. Filtering on your area of interest may be quite difficult, but in the end you can gather insight into everything that is going on. Messages in the middle establish "code freezes" (sent by Linux) when another version of Linux is to be closed off.

What I am ignoring so far is that Windows is much more than just a kernel, so the comparison is not truly fair. The problems that Windows may have faced in Vista is not necessarily "quality control", but immediate access to new features and managing the streams of code in real-time. Now, I am not saying there is a solution to this dilemma, but there is a problem to be solved.

If you rely on the quality gates, then a new feature that you depend on may only arrive after two weeks. Forget about putting pressure. Then you need to start a political fight with another department with a different budget and different bosses to get this feature in or *your* project will delay. Truth is that it's not truly the concern of that other department.

Open Source does not have a deadline and no requirement to make everything backwards compatible. Windows this is highly desired. So Windows needs to maintain backwards-compatible API's using a new structure of the kernel, but "looking" the same. We all know this is an impossible task...

So... we can argue... is the shipping of Windows Vista truly a miracle and good management, or could it have shipped way earlier if they would have managed things differently? Their personal experience shows that the way how it initially worked wasn't actually working very well...

SCRUM

There are different methods for project management besides the "Project Management Body Of Knowledge". The ancient "accredited" methods put a single guy as the responsible person for finishing and executing a project. This is just an observation at this point.

"Scrum" is another way of "managing". Actually, it is not really management, but mostly delegation. The scrum method is derived from agile project management and the team becomes responsible for its planning, estimation and execution. Well, the team led by the scrum master, sort of like a quarterback.

What I like about the method is that it allows you to extract information about the daily progress. For example, each task that is defined in this method will be estimated for a single day and one day only. There are no tasks that take two days. If there is one, it will be broken down into two parts. This facilitates management and tracking.

In the regular project management, a task may sometimes take 3, 5, 7 or 20 days. In the minds of some developers, this gives them "slack" and sometimes too much slack that the time is not properly controlled. At the end of the task, it may either be finished or backlogged. Imagine the surprise... And in steps the project manager to negotiate with the client.

Having it broken down in single tasks really facilitates tracking. The cool thing here is that the "whip" is no longer in the hands of the project manager. There is a public board on the wall that shows the tasks to be done, who is working on what and there is therefore transparency on other people's performance. This sort of means that everybody in the team has an invisible "imaginary" whip. Even though you wouldn't publically make anyone accountable, the people involved perceive a certain team pressure for complying with their agreed tasks and feel thus pressure to finish. This makes the integration within the team a lot stronger if the tasks *are* completed and opens up an interesting discussion if tasks are *not*. (this is where people management comes into play).

In the context of "Project Dune", I am planning to build a separated module for this type of management, so that electronically it is possible to track projects this way. There are quite a number of manual tasks involved still that should be automated.
(feature point management, project burndown, product burndown and impediment burndown).

The whole essence of scrum is making a sprint of 4 weeks and putting your foot down to complete it and manage your difficulties (impediments) plus tasks on a daily basis. This really helps to integrate your team better and establishes a much nicer team atmosphere than other management methods can do. However, this does depend on the commitment and attitude of the team.