Tim Churches wrote: > Note that agile development is very, very demanding on the customer to > be a) responsive and able to answer important, serious design questions > on a *daily* or even *hourly* basis; and b) prepared to think hard about > the questions, even when dog-tired. It also needs the programmer(s) to > have (or develop) a good understanding of the problem domain. > > In doing agile-style development on various public health apps, I > typically spend 15-30 mins per day on the phone with the primary > full-time developer, and another hour or so looking at and commenting on > (and testing to some degree) what he has done the previous day (or that > same day), plus half a day once per week in front of the whiteboard to > discuss and nut out design issues. All comments, issues etc are tracked > in a Web-based issues/bug tracking database, linked to wiki-style design > documents and notes and the SVN (Subversion) source code revisions > system (we use Trac for these purposes - not perfect, but very, very > functional - and written in... Python). Let's see - we are running at > about 100 issue "tickets" per month - so about 5 per day - some trivial, > some involving pages and pages of comments going back-and-forth, design > decisions being made etc. Very important to keep a shared record of all > these, else you go around in circles. Thus keeping one developer > productively occupied in an agile development project takes about 20-25% > of my working week. That's why I think that a team of about 5 or 6 > developers is the optimal size for a single full-time project manager to > oversee. > > Of course, if the developers are part-time, then things can run on a > more relaxed interaction cycle, but agile development does imply that > developer questions are answered very promptly and that design decisions > are made quickly, and not by convening a committee meeting in a few weeks. > Thanks for that real world feedback Tim. I am sure you are right. We can probably find a developer, we may even find the funding but we are still looking for the customer.
David _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
