Tools

Ok, so it is time to talk about the tools, what can you use to improve the productivity of your team?, many people will talk about sophisticated tools to manage the whole development cycle as well as tools for refactoring, etc, etc, etc. OK, not everybody can afford these tools and many of these tools need an army of consultants in order to be used effectively, so if you have the financial support go for them, for those of us that don't have them we need to go basic, we need to use libraries that enforce a standard way of working and remove the biggest architecture questions from the table, I have 2 tools that I love:

1. CSLA.NET, from Rocky Lhotka. This library is the foundation of his book ,This to me is the perfect framework, royalty free, an awesome community and a full reference book with real life examples!

2. Microsoft's Pattern and Practice enterprise library. This is a set of libraries that implement best practices for .NET, just like CSLA is royalty free, a great community and many resources.

I'll talk in detail on these frameworks on my next posts, I'll include links to the different communities, blogs and another resources that I found, as well as I'll write about my own experience.

The start.

OK, every book I read about software project management talks about having stakeholders that are involved, funding, risk management, etc, etc, etc. OK for the most part you don't get any of that, for the most part you get a project without a lot of management support (if you do, you are lucky), so what to do? how to achieve success on this environment? To me the most important part is communication with the user, a strong foundation to develop your software and protection of the scope, I want to talk on this post about the foundation.

We developers love to recreate every piece of technology to show that we can do it better, ok, this is the first non-sense that you need to remove from your team, what you need is to select a set of libraries to use (either open source or a commercial product) and make sure that your team learns how to use it. Why, if you do your job correctly those libraries will save you an incredible amount of time and they will improve your quality, you won't have problems with scaling your application or performance, those are problems that you don't want to deal when you have a deadline.

In my next post I will talk about some libraries that I used and the reasons behind using them, I hope this helps you to have a successful project.

Goals

As a project manager, I've learned that in order to be successful you need to have goals, without goals you just drift without direction and you get nowhere, so as I embark in this new adventure, I want to start by setting my goals:

1.Share my experiences as a project manager in software projects, more explicitly .NET Web applications.
2.Share my experiences as I create a new Micro-ISV.
3.Finally share my thoughts on books that I find interesting and relevant to project management, .NET technologies and Micro-ISV.
4.Post on this topics at least once a week.

I am sure that my main obstacle will be 4 but, hey, no pain no gain!