If your roadmap is all reactive, you will always be putting out fires — In my experience (anecdotal evidence, for sure), engineering tends to neglect the need for an engineering roadmap. Consequently, engineering often shows unprepared for market and business challenges, often surprising business/product-side stakeholders with requests to delay the start of critical initiatives. What is an Engineering Roadmap?

You already know the estimate is way off a few weeks after starting the project. So much effort went into estimating and then into the trash bin. But why? And how to do it better next time? — First, we need to understand what is an estimate. We are at a certain point in time, looking ahead, trying to make an educated guess about the future. That’s it—a guess. So, before we dive into estimation problems and how to estimate better, let’s get one thing straight:

How to make decisions more objective and auditable. — Managers and engineers often face difficult choices, such as which product to buy, which library to use, or which architectural decision to make. It can be tough to choose between alternatives, especially when different opinions and biases come into play. Luckily, there’s a great process for making these decisions in…

Testing automation is an investment; You pay it now and save it later. These are everyday situations when you may want to reconsider, as the return may not pay off the investment. — Automated testing has become essential to software development, helping teams improve their work’s speed and quality. It’s so critical that some professionals specialize in just automating tests (even though they are often also qualified to design and manually execute tests).

Unlocking the Power of Inquisitive Management: How to Refine Your High-Level Estimates with the Right Questions. — As a software engineering manager, creating high-level estimates is essential for planning and budgeting. However, estimating can be tricky when you don’t have all the necessary information. Asking the right questions is critical to uncovering relevant details that can impact your estimate accuracy.

Modern approaches meet classical definitions: Combine OKR, KPI, and GQ(i)M for a complete measurement strategy. — You have probably heard about OKR, KPI, and (hopefully) GQM/GQ(i)M. These are the most popular approaches to clearly communicating your goals, the results you expect to achieve to meet the goals, your key performance indicators (that will tell you how you are doing), and what you should measure to know…

These techniques can be used to prioritize your Engineering Roadmap, support Product Owners/Managers, and even your own tasks. — A big part of managing our teams’ deliveries is tied to how our roadmaps are prioritized. Usually, a team has one product-driven roadmap and one engineering-driven roadmap to be combined in a delivery plan. While Product Owners and other business stakeholders work to prioritize the product-driven roadmap, Engineering Managers are…

Communicating information needs to your teams and receiving valuable reports. — In today’s world, information is vital. It drives decisions, informs goals, and assesses initiatives. In software development, information is abundant, many of which are readily available from the tools we use to manage our work. Sadly, it is one-sided and only tells part of the story. Strategic Software Management and Measurement

How to accurately define software measures (according to the ISO/IEC/IEEE 15939:2017) — OK, all. Prepare for a dense article because I’m about to summarize everything you should know about software measurement definitions. I’ll tell you that most of this content was taken from the ISO/IEC/IEEE 15939:2017 “Systems and software engineering — Measurement process”. But truth be told, most of this standard came…