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Whenever I lead a project, I always try to plan in such a way that sets me and my team up for success.   I do this in many ways, starting with a good methodology, doing thorough analysis, and providing a level of risk/certainty along with any estimates I provide. 

Part of this strategy involves ensuring that client expectations match developer and project expectations.  I tend to use the tried and true approach; “Plan for the worst, hope for the best”.

Some people see me as a pessimist, but I beg to differ - I consider myself a cynical, yet optimistic, realist.  By that, I mean that although I do plan everything based upon the worst case scenario, in my heart I truly believe we are going to achieve the best case scenario every time.  It often surprises me when people take my approach to be negative while at the same time, I often see their approach naive & overly optimistic.

The truth is that there seems to be a gradient scale of attitudes and philosophies employed from project to project depending upon the people leading and participating in the project.

Over the years, I started a private game in my head of creating nicknames for the different patterns of behavior.  Here are a few names of I have toyed with in the past:

“Expect the worst, then add 20%” - The Pessimist

“Expect the worst, hope for the best” - Reformed Pessimist

Data Types a la Carte. Wouter Swierstra.

This paper describes a technique for assembling both data types and functions from isolated individual components. We also explore how the same technology can be used to combine free monads and, as a result, structure Haskell’s monolithic IO monad.

This new Functional Pearl has been mentioned twice in comments (1 , 2 ), and has now also appeared with comments on Phil Wadler’s blog. Obviously it’s time to put it on the front page.

You’ll probably have a few extra minutes on your hands while waiting for VS Express to download. Do yourself another favor and check out the breaking changes in.NET Framework 2.0 [BradA ]. The list is pretty small, considering the breadth of the framework, but you’ll probably find a favorite in there.

http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/archive/2005/11/14/430587.aspx

I’ve already written the much-delayed blog on Hosting, but I can’t post it yet because it mentions a couple of new Whidbey features, which weren’t present in the PDC bits.  Obviously Microsoft doesn’t want to make product disclosures through my random blog articles.

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I’m hoping this will be sorted out in another week or two.

While we’re waiting, I thought I would talk briefly(!) about pumping and apartments.  The CLR made some fundamental decisions about OLE, thread affinity, reentrancy and finalization.  These decisions have a significant impact on program correctness, server scalability, and compatibility with legacy (i.e. unmanaged) code.  So this is going to be a blog like the one on Shutdown from last August (see http://blogs.msdn.com/cbrumme/archive/2003/08/20/51504.aspx ).  There will be more detail than you probably care to know about one of the more frustrating parts of the Microsoft software stack.

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Using the most recent features in Java is not always possible if you need to stick to earlier Java JDK’s. This post presents a short recipe on using JSR-105 (XML Digital Signature API) — which forms part of JDK 6 release — in earlier JDK/JREs such as JDK 1.4 or JDK 5.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techtarget/tsscom/blogs/~3/244457030/thread.tss

Charles Torre and Robert Scoble (behind the camera) dropped by my office to chat with me about the loader for MSDN’s Channel 9: part I and part II.
Also, check out the PDC video I was in for Channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=79591
http://blogs.msdn.com/suzcook/archive/2005/02/11/channel-9-interview.aspx

Won’t you join us for some holiday cheer?

Place: Rock Bottom @ State & Grand in Chicago
Time: 6PM

Please note that this is next Thursday, December 15.

I’ll be giving away another JetBrains.NET Action Pack, consisting of ReSharper and dotTrace licenses (one each).

Happy Holidays!
http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/archive/2005/12/08/432710.aspx

DISCLAIMER:  The following post represents my personal opinions and thoughts, not that of my employer.

As a Telligent employee and weblogs.asp.net blogger, I hate the fact that the recent upgrade caused problems for the weblogs.asp.net community and that it has affected the perception of Telligent as its steward.   I wasnt one of the developers who worked on the project, but I couldnt help but feel a twinge of pain each time I read a post (often rightfully) slamming the team and company who delivered this upgrade.

Long before I joined Telligent, I was one of the more vocal bloggers about the mishandling of the weblogs.asp.net site.   The great irony is that most of my arguments at that time were about how rarely the site was updated to newer versions of.TEXT and CS.   Since that time, its hard to argue that it hasnt gotten much better.  Eventually I became satisfied and frequently impressed with the website changes as we finally were able to take advantage of Community Server’s outstanding features. 

This latest release really excited me because it was very timely (coming on the heals of CS 2007’s release) and had the potential to allow me to finally have the level of control I wanted over my blog’s presentation.

Even with the recent problems, especially the fact that I need to resubmit my javascript, I’m still excited about this release.   In fact, I truly was never all that disturbed by the problems as they were occurring

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Costs

Finalization is expensive.  It has the following costs:

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No matter how faithfully you try to follow your chosen project methodology (Scrum, Extreme Programming, Waterfall, CMMI, etc.) ultimately the strengths, weaknesses, successes, and failures you experience are determined by the habits, attitude, and style of the project manager and team members on the project. 

How is communication conducted? Meetings, hallway, bullpen, email, IM?

How do you react to change?  How well do you manage scope?

How much trust/distrust is there amongst team members?

How rigorously or adaptively do you apply your process to each project?

Do you micromanage or do you empower?

This is the crux of why so many people disagree with most definitions of exactly what Agile is.  This is why some people fail with one methodology while others succeed, and some unique individuals actually find great success with seemingly outdated methodologies like Waterfall.   Much like with any good pasta, its not the ingredients in the sauce, its the sauce-maker(s).

I guarantee you that even the most rigorous Agile shop will see great variance (good and bad) between projects merely due to the different personalities of the project managers who manage each project.  This is the human factor of software development that can never completely be erased.  Your best hope is to try to control, monitor, and compensate.

There are plenty of excellent books to help you define your rules-of-engagement, develop good habits, and provide checks-and-balances throughout your project.  However, ultimately experience is our best teacher for what habits, styles, and attitudes result in the most successful projects.  Of course, to complicate things further, these same success factors may change from project to project.