Pick up a copy of Kent Becks' book Extreme Programming Explained: embrace change.
Where I work, we are in the same situation, both our project managers and sometimes our staff managers have no technical experience.
I can tell you that technical folk managing projects doesn't work. What this did to us is cause the project managers to do very little, other than sit around and mandadate scope and delivery dates to the technical lead, who has to then force their developers to produce crappy software.
So, while I don't have a solution, the XP book at least give me hope that there is a better way...
I work on a very large software project. 6million+ lines of active source code, with 400,000 new development hours per year and growing. -and- we are on our extimates well over 80% of the time. (if we don't hit it, we are under).
How is this possible? It has evolved over time, some of the same people who started this project 9 years ago are still here and they know the system very well. That knowledge, combined with good project management leads us to several categories. During a requirements phase, designers assign a complexity to the changes for a module, and based on the type an hours extimate is generated.
Now, Lewis is right, no algorithm can be developed to figure out the compleixty, but a human can, and the computer can figure out how many hours should be devoted to documentation, coding, and testing.
My overall point, as a software product matures...esitmates are easy to estimate and project dates are easier to meet. But you already knew that...
Yesterday about 1,000 phones were sent to both the washington DC and NYC areas. (this is a pretty big deal since customer care workers activated all these by hand).
Last night we batch activated and programmed an additoinal 850 handsets (in about 25 minutes). These phones should be distributed today.
And to clarify...I don't work for Sprint PCS...but rather a Cincinnati based company called Convergys. Sprint is one of our clients.
I hope that these phones will be helpfull to all who need them.
set mch = `hostname - s`
set wam = `whoami`
set prompt = "${mch:q}: ${wam} {\!} "
alias setprompt 'set prompt="${mch:q}: ${cwd}{\!} "'
alias cd 'chdir \!* && setprompt'
I just wanted to say that I have a Tektronix terminal on my desk at work (we have quit a few of them actually) and it's great!. I checked with Tektronix a couple of months ago, and you can't even get parts for these things now. I did find some on eBay though:)
This is all about the presentation. I'm 22, less than a year out of school, and I'm already taking on design tasks on par with senior level developers (15+ years of experience).
Make sure you don't act young, that you portray yourself as someone who knows that they're taking about.
In the development world, doing is half the battle. Knowing and dealing with people is much more important in determining how people look at you.
I'm actually serious about this. (and probably partial since i work for one of the largest billing providers in the world)
Comercial billing providers do everything for you, provide a nice front end, and can process exponentially more records in real time than you probably want to ever have to deal with. It's all about revenue assurance. If your open source billing solutin drops records or fails to send out bills, who do you go to? If your comercial software fails, you have a couple billion dollars behind it.
not meant to be flame bait, just meant to say that there are some really good comercial products out there for tier 2 & 3 providers (where a startup would fall) that come ready to install and are proven to work with tier 1 providers.
There was a system in the 80s called CHIP, (a nifty little cisc architecture) and an OS that ran on it called HOCA. the entire thing was done from scratch.
Last year, at Xavier University we used a new system called MPS, which generally simulates a MIPS processors. The OS for this is called TINA and somewhat based on HOCA (the kernel can be easily ported). Again whole thing from scratch. as far as I know, only 2~3 people in the world have actually finished this academic project. (it wasn't easy)
Slashdot Mirror
Pick up a copy of Kent Becks' book Extreme Programming Explained: embrace change.
Where I work, we are in the same situation, both our project managers and sometimes our staff managers have no technical experience.
I can tell you that technical folk managing projects doesn't work. What this did to us is cause the project managers to do very little, other than sit around and mandadate scope and delivery dates to the technical lead, who has to then force their developers to produce crappy software.
So, while I don't have a solution, the XP book at least give me hope that there is a better way...
I couldn't find it, but are these discs currently in publication? and If so...which alubms?
:)
I'd be interested in picking one up, but I won't attempt to reverse engineer...that's prohibited
I work on a very large software project. 6million+ lines of active source code, with 400,000 new development hours per year and growing. -and- we are on our extimates well over 80% of the time. (if we don't hit it, we are under).
How is this possible? It has evolved over time, some of the same people who started this project 9 years ago are still here and they know the system very well. That knowledge, combined with good project management leads us to several categories. During a requirements phase, designers assign a complexity to the changes for a module, and based on the type an hours extimate is generated.
Now, Lewis is right, no algorithm can be developed to figure out the compleixty, but a human can, and the computer can figure out how many hours should be devoted to documentation, coding, and testing.
My overall point, as a software product matures...esitmates are easy to estimate and project dates are easier to meet. But you already knew that...
I know this if flame bait, but these guys are full of crap...they can come down here and watch me dial my damn phone number all day long
You know what...i'm copyright the thread patterns in underware...everyone who wears underwear must pay me $100 a day to wear underwear.
/p
Just an update to my short post yesterday
Yesterday about 1,000 phones were sent to both the washington DC and NYC areas. (this is a pretty big deal since customer care workers activated all these by hand).
Last night we batch activated and programmed an additoinal 850 handsets (in about 25 minutes). These phones should be distributed today.
And to clarify...I don't work for Sprint PCS...but rather a Cincinnati based company called Convergys. Sprint is one of our clients.
I hope that these phones will be helpfull to all who need them.
Sprint PCS is donating Cell phones to the red cross as we speak.
I'm sitting at my desk right now writing a script to activate the phones to the network elements and create the account.
cvg
We have quite a large staff that telecommutes from India to locations in cincinnati and orlando.
:)
too bad I can't go into more detail
set mch = `hostname - s`
set wam = `whoami`
set prompt = "${mch:q}: ${wam} {\!} "
alias setprompt 'set prompt="${mch:q}: ${cwd}{\!} "'
alias cd 'chdir \!* && setprompt'
I just wanted to say that I have a Tektronix terminal on my desk at work (we have quit a few of them actually) and it's great!. I checked with Tektronix a couple of months ago, and you can't even get parts for these things now. I did find some on eBay though :)
This is all about the presentation. I'm 22, less than a year out of school, and I'm already taking on design tasks on par with senior level developers (15+ years of experience).
Make sure you don't act young, that you portray yourself as someone who knows that they're taking about.
In the development world, doing is half the battle. Knowing and dealing with people is much more important in determining how people look at you.
I'm actually serious about this. (and probably partial since i work for one of the largest billing providers in the world)
Comercial billing providers do everything for you, provide a nice front end, and can process exponentially more records in real time than you probably want to ever have to deal with. It's all about revenue assurance. If your open source billing solutin drops records or fails to send out bills, who do you go to? If your comercial software fails, you have a couple billion dollars behind it.
not meant to be flame bait, just meant to say that there are some really good comercial products out there for tier 2 & 3 providers (where a startup would fall) that come ready to install and are proven to work with tier 1 providers.
i agree. once you can get over the tax rate, canada is the place to be.
There was a system in the 80s called CHIP, (a nifty little cisc architecture) and an OS that ran on it called HOCA. the entire thing was done from scratch.
Last year, at Xavier University we used a new system called MPS, which generally simulates a MIPS processors. The OS for this is called TINA and somewhat based on HOCA (the kernel can be easily ported). Again whole thing from scratch. as far as I know, only 2~3 people in the world have actually finished this academic project. (it wasn't easy)