Software Construction - Goals for '04

I've seen many a New Years resolution blogged over the past week: promises, hopes, dreams and even pure speculation; so, I thought that I might lay down my own vision for the year.

I'm hoping that this year I will take a giant step forward to mastering 2 important areas of Software Construction: estimating and delivery. To that end, this year I'll be focussing nearly all of my blogging efforts (from this blog at least) on the following items. I'll be re-arranging my categories to reflect these items and, I'll also be creating a new category called "Golden Rules"; my hope is that, by years end, I'll have 7 items in the Golden Rules category derived from all of the entries that focus on the topics listed below:

GOALS THIS YEAR:

• improve estimations
• improve delivery
  • on time
  • on budget
  • on spec (features)
• reduce lines of code
  • increase re-use
• reduce re-work
• introduce new techniques, practices
• improve developer satisfaction
• Re-read Code Complete
• Decide (finally) for myself whether automated Unit testing is good or evil

FOCUS AREAS:

{snipped from the web}
In order to have quite good estimates you need :
a very good requirement documentation a development process which is stable and visible an organization where developers wouldn't be afraid of stating their ignorance about some technical matter an environment that encourage the developers to state their true estimates instead of guessing what the boss already had in mind to accept that development activity by definition includes many risks of unforeseen problems getting in the way later the willing to invest more in the estimating process instead of freezing the first estimate at the very beginning of the development.

• Estimation  ( subscribe to category goals2004_Estimation )
  • Further reading: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?EstimationWoes
  • not only improve the initial estimation but improve the ongoing monitoring of the estimate
  • Cut the fat
    • reduce time to deploy
    • produce better quality estimates
• Coding Quality  ( subscribe to category goals2004_CodeQuality )
  • Improve Planning
  • Improve Testing
  • mprove Code Reviews
    • at least 2 reviewers per review
  • Highlight Good Code
• Pair Programming ( subscribe to category goals2004_PairProgramming )

METRICS  ( subscribe to category goals2004_Metrics )

• size of project
  • features produced
    • lines of code per feature
  • non-features produced
    • lines of code per non-feature
  • lines of generated code
• number of bugs
• bug triage time as a percentage of development time
• Further reading: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SqlLineCount