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When 2-3 bright engineers are working on something they very precisely (usually) know what they are doing. If one of them says "It's going to take six to eight
by subbu 18y ago
When 2-3 bright engineers are working on something they very precisely (usually) know what they are doing. If one of them says "It's going to take six to eight weeks" then all the planning would've already happened in the programmer's brain. Even if it takes twice as much (10-12 weeks or about 3 months) it's not much because the baseline itself is pretty small. With this mental planning, spending time on bug tracking and filling a spreadsheet is a waste of his productive time. They will find tools like Twitter far more useful than FogBugz. In this case Twitter acts as more of communication tool than a project management tool.
In such small teams 'What are you working on' is more important than filling fields like 'bug type' and 'browser' or 'steps to reproduce'.
As we discover new ways to communicate traditional tools like bug tracking may become obsolete.
- anthonyrubin 18y agoUnfortunately most companies don't put much thought into the tools and processes they use. They simply do what everyone else is doing. This is why monstrosities such as Quality Center are popular even though they are disgustingly expensive and of questionable value. This is the failing of the idea that you can take someone who is really good at management (or in most cases, really mediocre) and put them in charge of software developers. When your manager doesn't have a deep understanding of what you do they have little ability to judge how well you do it. So they look at all sorts of questionable metrics, reports and graphs to try to make sense of things.