Software Project Management

Interesting Russian article about PM and how to make decisions/changes so that team accepts them without fight.

Some hints and techniques on how to do live interview.

Piece of advice from Joel Spolsky on how to do the phone-screening. With concrete examples of topics and questions.

An approach to Project Management (and the tool to implement it), where the entire process is completely transparent, and all the decisions are made by team itself.

Cool and very-very detailed howto (by Steve Yegge) on how to do phone-screening interview for hiring candidates.

Interesting article which highlights important PM aspects, using Darth Vader as an example of great PM.

Detailed and well-thought-thru article on brainstorming. But, as I see it, it is only author's opinion on the effective brainstorms. I have seen/participated/led brainstorms which violated some of the rules he proposed, and they still provided good value outcome.

Simple advice on how to do esimates, schedule, and how to later control the schedule execution. Most probably "as is" it can only be used on smaller projects. Also, highlights a few cool features of MS Excel, which can be used for the proposed method, and for other tasks.

Examples of project document and status report for small projects (e.g. under 100 man-hours).

(Russian article) Raises a valid question: how do we statistically interpret PERT deviation? Can we use it to estimate confidence level? Author thinks it is too much inaccurate, from pure statistics point of view. Proposes alternative approach (based on 2 point estimations, min & max, and Normal distribution.

Short howto on using PERT in Microsoft Project.

Prototyping lifecycle model.

One more lifecycle model. New one. Looks like some kind of Agile. Quite complex.

V-Model (one more project lifecycle model). Steps similar to waterfall, but, unlike Waterfall, allows going back to earlier stages -- if a problem found on latest stage and needs to be corrected.

Spiral lifecycle. Was invented by a particular company in their specific project environment. As far as I know, has no wide applications in other teams.

Iterative project lifecycle explained.

Some more basic details on Waterfall model.

Basic, classic approach to software development.

An example, a good one, and a guide, on how to write useful functional specifications. Useful and fun.