Part II: Managing Development

In this section, I'll address the activities that typically occur when managing the project implementation. This includes organizing the requirements into appropriately sized pieces, prioritizing and planning the development of those pieces, and tracking the overall progress of both the work performed and the work remaining. This represents a major part of the resource expenditure and often receives a great deal of management attention. Knowing how much work is left to do and when you're likely to finish is the dream of every project manager. The techniques presented here will help you accomplish that.

I have chosen to design the solutions in this section around the agile methodology. This is a widely adopted approach with lots of successful agile projects to its credit. If you've done any agile development, the process and terminology should be familiar to you. If you're not using the agile approach, the techniques provided here can be adapted to suit your environment. Read through these chapters and apply the pieces that fit.

In Chapter 6 you'll provide a list that will contain user stories, which is a way of breaking the project into implementable and deliverable chunks. These can be linked to the requirements, which allow you to trace the mapping between requirements and implementation. In Chapter 7 you'll add a project backlog as a view into these stories. This is sometimes called the stack and represents the work left to be done. In Chapter 8 you'll provide the ability to group these into iterations (also called sprints).

In Chapter 9 you'll support the remaining work items, which include tasks, issues, and defects. Finally, in Chapter 10, you'll provide various metrics to provide visibility into the overall project progress, including burn-down charts.