The Project Shrink » prototyping http://www.projectshrink.com Welcome To Shrinkonia. Sun, 05 Feb 2012 15:53:53 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Relationship Between Creative Thinking And Play http://www.projectshrink.com/creative-thinking-and-play-807.html http://www.projectshrink.com/creative-thinking-and-play-807.html#comments Fri, 21 Nov 2008 19:32:45 +0000 Bas http://blog.softwareprojects.org/?p=807 Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Relationship Between Creative Thinking And Play is a post from: Project Shrink.

]]> Designer Tim Brown talks in a new Ted.com presentation about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play. This 30 minute presentation is very interesting for Project Managers:

  • In the opening minutes he demonstrates that we fear the judgment of our peers, and therefor are embarrassed to show our ideas (perhaps, that is why every PM does exactly the same thing over and over again).
  • He talks about how the workplace and the culture of the company can enhance creativity and with that bring the team towards creating great solutions.
  • And a special note for all you software people out there: check around 15:00: the importance of prototyping and feedback to end users!



Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Relationship Between Creative Thinking And Play is a post from: Project Shrink.

]]> http://www.projectshrink.com/creative-thinking-and-play-807.html/feed 0 Specifications and Productivity and Defect Rate http://www.projectshrink.com/specifications-and-productivity-and-defect-rate-7.html http://www.projectshrink.com/specifications-and-productivity-and-defect-rate-7.html#comments Mon, 06 Nov 2006 16:24:15 +0000 Bas http://blog.softwareprojects.org/specifications-and-productivity-and-defect-rate-5.html Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Specifications and Productivity and Defect Rate is a post from: Project Shrink.

]]> Most development projects spend effort in creating specifications: functional, technical, detailed, global. Putting the designs in writing takes a lot of work, and it will not be used in the end result; specifications are supporting artifacts.

So, the question if specifications are worth the effort is legit. Jeff Sutherland quotes some research in this area in his article Future of Scrum: Support for Parallel Pipelining of Sprints in Complex Projects

Two metrics are mentioned: the productivity of the development group and the defect rate. In a tongue-and-cheek definition, the productivity is the amount of features / lines-of-code build in a given time frame, and the defect rate is the number of bugs found per amount of features / lines-of-code.

The article of Sutherland mentions that there is a strong relationship between the completeness of the formal specification and the productivity. The better the sense of the developers is of the desired end product from a functional perspective, the faster the program.

The other way round with completeness of design specifications and the defect rate. The relationship between them is found very weak. So, writing more detailed designs before programming doesnt reduce the amount of bugs.

Leaving us with the question what can we do about defect rate and productivity. In the mentioned article the following options are provided for lowing the defect rate: early prototypes, design reviews and testing at code check in. Increased productivity is reached by early prototyping and daily builds of the software.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Specifications and Productivity and Defect Rate is a post from: Project Shrink.

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