Expensive Technical Resources, Changing Burn Rates and Technical Debt We wrote before how after twenty five years the success rate for software development teams across all industries has increased from 16% to only 29% being on time and within budget. The startup founder who enters this arena should be aware of  this because they already know that there will be startup “gotchas”, also known as challenges, that are unique to startups and early stage companies and unlikely to be an issue with traditional enterprise teams. These challenges are many. Whether they are bootstrapped or venture-funded, they have extremely limited money for software development, which can be expensive. The product is Read more

Our previous post looked at how projects have failed over the last 25 years and the minor increase in the success rate from 16% to 29%. That is still abysmally low. What if your project is failing – can it be rescued? Read more

History of Success and Failure 25 years ago just 16.2% of all MIS projects were completed on time and within budget according to something appropriately called the CHAOS report by the Standish Group. 52.7% were late and over budget, and 31.1% were outright cancelled. The top two reasons then were lack of user input/involvement and incomplete requirements. What has changed over 25 years? Standish recently reported an improvement from 16.2% to 29% success rate. Certain projects were as high as 62%. I’ll get to that later. Despite this improvement, that’s awfully low! Success and failure rates in other industries? Let’s look at the Home Redecorating/Remodeling industry with kitchen and bathroom Read more

One step closer to the better understanding and collaboration with UX designers! Read more

Developers are often tasked with adding a slider to a site—most often, to the front page. In this post, I will talk about how to add a slider to a home page in Drupal 8. Read more

1. Staff Pros: easy to collaborate with, having staff on-site all day long. Cons: value (talent for the cost). Strong engineering talent is very hard to find—you’d have to pay a lot more than you would pay S&F for the same level of talent (if you could even find it). Most likely you’ll find someone junior who will cost about the same as Speed and Function. 2. Contractor(s) Pros: same as above if on-site. If off-site, contracts can be cheaper because individuals typically spend less time than a team. Cons: same as the cons if on-site. Off-site, you’ll run into management issues, availability, responsiveness, etc. You don’t get access to specialized Read more

Akamai reports that hackers are turning “smart” devices into botnets, or a group of computers that, without their owners’ knowledge, send out spam or viruses to other computers on the Internet. A common tactic is to use a proxy that hits a target from a variety of locations.  The most widespread device used in such attacks is a CCTV camera with a DVR, satellite antennas, networking routers and modems, and NAS. Read more

A company’s daily use of Scrum time adds up.  Why not cut this cost?  Imagine how much money you could save with a five-person team if it didn’t need to spend time in daily scrums, doing actual work instead.  It can be as many as five hours a week. The reality is that, in our experience, the cost of an engineer’s dissociation from a project is higher.  Building the wrong project because an employee made wrong assumptions, because they didn’t talk to the client, can be a lot more costly than the cost of Scrum for one employee, one hour per week per person. Read more

Most of the JavaScript frameworks I’ve seen suffered from over-configuration and exposing too much detail. Error reporting is usually obscure, there are too many ways to accomplish the same thing, and there are no clearly defined conventions. And then came Meteor, a “full-stack JavaScript platform for developing modern web and mobile applications.” It works right out of the box, provides a nice command line tool with readable output, and clearly establishes a “meteor way” of doing things. Read more