With software “eating the world” more and more people find themselves managing software projects.  While many people have experience programming and others have experience managing teams, software engineering has its own set of challenges.  Creating software that solves a problem, is easy to use, doesn’t break all the time, doesn’t die under load, is easily changed and adapted, that new programmers can learn quickly and for a reasonable price… is hard.  In this blog series I’ll cover the forces that drive software and what you can do to keep your project in the fast lane instead of  broken down on the side of the road.

The general outline.

• Project Failure.
• Brook’s law, why software engineering is not programming.
• Time, Features, Quality.
• Why we need Quality.
• What about Cost?
• Strategies for balancing.
• The Two Track Tradeoff.
• Agile: Feature Slip Projects.
• Labs, how to avoid rigidity.
• … lots more …
• Summary, if you can only read one post.