I couldn't sleep last night so I started reading Edward Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information", and I started thinking about software project metrics that might be useful to the team members on a software development project (including developers, business analysts, domain experts, and stakeholders), and how I would show these metrics in simple but data-filled Tufte charts and graphs.
Summary: A quick look at "The Toyota Way", and how information technology (IT) is looked at from the framework of The Toyota Way.
Here's an interesting quote from a book called The Toyota Way:
Here's a page that lists a bunch of cost estimating tools for software development.
Here is a link to Steve McConnell's Classic Mistakes Enumerated, from his book titled "Rapid Development". It is a great listing of 36 common problems that plague software development projects.
Dear Mr./Ms. IT Manager,
As the former owner of a very successful software consulting firm, here are several "truths" that you should know about the real costs of employing bad software developers (programmers):
Here's a link to a Code Kata site. It discusses the importance of practice in the software industry. It seems like the basic theory is "If musicians and athletes believe that practice is extremely important, why don't developers (and organizations that develop software)?"
At the moment I'm not aware of any software organization that takes time out for skills practice, unless training on new products or languages counts ... and I don't think it does. Kudos.
