An straetegy to easily add new tasks to a big project

The authors of Managing the unmanageable came to visit our office and they gave us insights to improve our processes as well as some methods to organize projects. Something that is very interesting about the book, is that it contains valuable and innovative information about managing software projects, and in my opinion the strategies and recommendations can be applied to lots of projects, even if they are not related to software. The one that I'm about to talk about is -I believe- designed for big projects. So let's start talking about the context, so you can find why doing this will be useful and probably the ideas that brought this method into something real.

When you're getting started with a big project, you'll create a first list of tasks that will be developed, from this list, there will come more and more tasks as the project gets developed, so, figuring out how much effort is required for each task can take a lot of time if you don't have anything that leverage the way that this happens, so I'll present you with the steps required for this strategy:

• Divide the project in tasks
• Assign each task a number that represents how difficult the task is
• Sort the tasks

Once that the tasks are sorted, as you can probably imagine, it's very easy to keep the list sorted when more tasks area added to the project, and to estimate the effort required for them,  you just need to compare them with a similar task. This are some of the advantages that you can find when you use this method:

• Adding new tasks is easy, you can compare similar tasks and make a good bet on how much effort it's required for the task and where in the level of effort required does this task falls into place
• You can give a more accurate delivery date for the project, because it's more easy to develop
• Adding big pieces to the project should take less time to organize and make the estimates

Administrative goodies - An overview of major software aspects

I wanted to dedicate an entry to the administrative aspect of sofware projects, because sometimes the project can have a very good architecture, excellent code and marvellous performance and yet it fails the expectations because it has a very poor administration. I will not get very deep into this topic, because it is the least technical aspect (at least for developers and IT persons).

Basically these are the major administrative aspects:

• Licensing. How are you going to license the project? is it a free social project? are you going to sell add ons? how much will each license cost. These are some questions that must be answered when creating a software project, because in the end you need to find a way to pay for the development of the project. You must also make sure that you're following the rules of your country, otherwise you'll have problems when trying to commercialize the project.
• Marketing. You have to know very well your target market to do marketing. It's important to reach your people and to make them use your software. Here you must think about stuff like: is there any other similar software? how can I reach more people? what are the strengths of the system? How can I communicate the features of the system to the target users?
• Brand creation. It doesn't matter if the project is going to be free. if you're targeting a wide market of people, you must create your brand and make everybody recognize the project with the logo or slogan of it. Think about a small and easy to understand slogan that describes your system. Have you seen this before? of course! for giving you an example, all apple products have a very small slogan that makes all the world know why are they created and the usage that each product has.
• Payment methods. If you're going to commercialize your project, keep in mind the payment methods, and analyse the options that you can offer to your target market.
• Contracts. If you're selling the software to another company,  don't forget to have a very good and specific contract! The documentation made for the test can be helpful, because it describes the features covered and the expectations, so you can use it for the contract with your customer.

Short entry, I know! but I hope you like it. Leave comments at the end of the section and let me know if you want me to talk about a particular topic.

Introduction - An overview of major software aspects

It's time to start a series of posts related to major software aspects. Every topic is too big for itself to be covered completely with just one post, so the purpose of these series is:

• Have an overview of every aspect in a language that everyone with some knowledge about software development can understand and find it useful. 
• Understand why software development is so important nowadays and also why it's so complex

These is the index of the topics that I will cover:

1. Performance - back end and
2. Performance - front end
3. Clean code
4. Software architecture
5. Soft skills
6. Administrative aspects

Keep in mind that the affirmations in the post are valid for web applications and mobile apps. This is because most systems nowadays fall in one of this categories.

I you want me to talk about a particular subject, just let me know in the comments. Enjoy the series!