Project management

[Alex Satrapa]

On Fri, 2002-11-15 at 15:43, Sam Couter wrote:
> Avoid "literate" programming. It wants to generate the code from the
> documentation instead of the other way around.

IMHO, the biggest problem with literate programming is that it
encourages you to try to define the whole solution before you really
know the whole problem.

In most software projects that I've been involved in, there were two
real phases - one is requirements discovery, the other is software
development.  Most companies have used "prototype" software to do the
requirements discovery, then left that as the "production" software
because they suddenly realise what a mammoth effort actually
*engineering* the real product will be.

Some managers see to think it's better spending $100kpa holding a
spit-and-string solution together, than spending the $2M to build a
system that will actually work properly and not cause further irritation
and pain to their staff.

> I've never seen a good use for Word except for burning daylight,
> increasing blood pressure and testing backup recovery processes.

When used properly, Word is a great documentation tool.  It provides
features that I use all the time such as:
 - Outline mode (work breakdown structures, document outlines, etc)
 - Comments/Annotations
 - Footnotes and endnotes
 - Paragraph numbering (that makes sense)
 - Style based formatting

The times I've seen people have problem with Microsoft Word are when
they've tried formatting an entire document using character based
formatting (eg: "Bold, 18pt" instead of "Heading 1", or two returns
between paragraphs instead of setting paragraph spacing to 6pt top and
bottom).

YMMV, but like other powerful tools, the better trained and more
experienced users will cause less collateral damage.

> As for project management... I've seen about a billion different
> systems, none of which satisfied me. MS Project is a good Gantt chart
> drawing tool, but don't use it for anything else.

The *best* project management tool I've ever used was MicoPlanner
X-Pert, by Micro Planning International (http://www.mpi.com.au/).

Alex
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