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What cause failure in a project from my point of view are a couple of small basic Issues.

  1. Sufficient Information.
  2. Leadership
  3. Talent

I know it seems like I’m over simplifying things, but I’m about the general case why projects tend to fail. Not because the company got sold, or one day you your systems collapse the day before ship or anything short of divine intervention.

1. Sufficient Information:

Providing proper documentation about the project is essential to the success, a lot of people are of the notion that the developer doesn’t need to everything about a project. While they don’t need to know everything it would be nice to know most of it. This means that the Analyst or PM must provide all work flows of how a user’s will be accessing and using the application. so that there are know gotcha’s in the end. I do not place most the blame on the Analyst or PM because the user might not at the time tell them everything. But that is there job… to quote Billy Hollis ” this is where prototyping with a rapid feedback loops is essential.”

2. Leadership:

There needs a to be a person providing the direction technical or non-technical direction, but someone with a vision of some sort. This is so that the project feels more than just that, making the people involved as part of something greater; giving them a sense of ownership in what there doing.

3. Talent:

There needs to be a person that pushes the envelope and set the bar. There something to be said about people who truly love what there doing, if you project is full of people that just want to be there 8 to 5 and just get there task done…well you gonna put out something that reflect 8 to 5 and just works, and feels like any other application.

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So I have been getting into XAML, And actually witting the markup by hand. And it reminds
me of java and how we had to arrange the UI with the swing components using panes. But for the most part it was basically the same except it was all done in XML instead of programmatic (even though you can still do it programmatically WPF).

Then i went and downloaded the trial edition of Microsoft Expression Design… Think Flash meets Photoshop. You get all the Glits of photoshop and the vector graphics of flash. So i created a small project and placed objects, applied a couple filters to give it the Photoshop type glitz. So i got curios what would the the XAML file look like after i export it. I exported it to a XAML file and opended it in notepad. Man it was huge…but i could understand what was going on still….so you still have the option of going in and tweaking things by hand. You could never get those effects with out a design tool, it would just drive you insane

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In my previous post i was talking about retro fitting extreme programming into agile programming… well guess what its been already defined… its called… SCRUM

So what is Scrum development?
It’s a team based, project segmentation development pattern. So whats so new about it nothing really its just a mash up of old and new practices. The project gets split into small segments( or feature for you agile guys) and each team (like in extreme programming) works on a segment.

Since this is basically building developing a project out of small components. The smaller the component the faster you can build the system.

the reason i like this idea is because its an extensible development process.

References:

  1. Control Chaos: http://www.controlchaos.com/about/]
  2. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_%28development%29