WHITE PAPERS SPONSORED PROFILES JOB BOARD WEBINAR CENTER FREE SOFTWARE BZ RESEARCH ALMSHAREPOINT EVENTS CALENDAR PRINT/PDF EDITION PRINT/PDF BACK ISSUES

SUBSCRIBE TODAY CUSTOMER SERVICE EDITORIAL BEATS GUEST VIEW GUIDE SD TIMES 100 GUIDE EVENTS CALENDAR ADVERTISING ARTICLE REPRINTS REPORT A BUG SITE MAP

ABOUT US BZ MEDIA NEWS BZ RESEARCH NEWS ON MONDAY SPTECHREPORT SPTECHWEB SPTECHCON IPHONE/IPAD DEVCON ANDROID DEVCON PRIVACY POLICY CONTACT US

HOME >> LATEST NEWS

Watts Humphrey shares his 'Reflections on Management'

By David Worthington

June 18, 2010 — (Page 1 of 4)
Watts Humphrey headed the IBM development team that introduced the first software license, and he later served as its director of programming and vice president of technical development. He is a fellow of the Software Engineering Institute and the Association for Computing Machinery, as well as a recipient of The United States Patent and Trademark Office's National Medal of Technology.

Accolades and accomplishments aside, he's also made his share of mistakes, and from his decades of experiences, he learned hard lessons about how software projects should be managed, how to manage teams, his bosses and himself. Humphrey recounts those experiences in his recent book, "Reflections on Management," which is the subject of his interview with SD Times.

SD Times: In your book, you discuss at length the impact that poor planning has on quality. How does a programming manager know whether they created a quality plan or not?
Watts Humphrey: A good plan must meet four requirements: It must be in sufficient detail to guide the work; it must accurately represent the costs and time required to do the work; it must be supported by sufficient facts and data to be convincing to senior management; and it must be owned by the development team and represent what all of the members are personally committed to accomplishing.

Since most plans are made by the managers and not the developers, they cannot meet requirements 1 and 4 and rarely meet requirements 2 and 3. These requirements can be met consistently when teams make their own plans. However, today’s software developers typically don’t know how to make plans and don’t believe that they should. They generally believe that planning is something that managers do. Changing these attitudes and skills is the key to good planning, and the Software Engineering Institute has developed the Team Software Process to guide developers and their management in doing this. I describe how the TSP does this and why this method is so effective in some of my books and papers.

Related Search Term(s): IBM, professional development

Pages 1 2 3 4

Share this link: http://sdt.bz/34431

Most Read Latest News Blog Resources

Virtualization: Not just for machines anymore
Network virtualization allows multi-tiered applications to behave as though they were in a physical network

Magic announces the release of its revolutionary mobile offering for the development of business applications, with new native clients for iOS and Android platforms
Magic announced today the availability of native iOS and Android clients for its mobile enterprise application platform

Achievements and learning: Gamification comes to businesses and schools
Startup takes page from gamers by offering achievement marks to get developers more engaged in their projects

Zeichick’s Take: The handheld and the tablet, circa 1976
Texas Instruments' and Hewlett-Packard's calculators were doing things decades ago we take for granted today

Virtualization: Not just for machines anymore
Network virtualization allows multi-tiered applications to behave as though they were in a physical network

Achievements and learning: Gamification comes to businesses and schools
Startup takes page from gamers by offering achievement marks to get developers more engaged in their projects

Google talks tools at AnDevCon III
New 3D debugging tool and recent ADK changes are detailed by Google developers at the third Android Developer Conference

SmartBear rolls out new quality solution: API Complete
Software gives organizations ability to write test scripts and monitor APIs by bridging the DevOps divide

Creation
To write better software, cultivate your ability to be creative.

Slick...but who needs it?
compilr.com is a well-designed site and the folks behind it seem to have their heart in the right place. But...who needs it?

How to be a better software developer
Want to be a better developer? You won't get there by mastering an interesting language or learning a new set of APIs.

Wooing Galatea
Do yourself a favor and check out Galatea 2.2, a wonderful book by novelist Richard Powers.

Five SCM Best Practices Two-thirds of all software projects fail, according to the Standish Group’s CHAOS study. Improper usage of software configuration management...

Best Practices for Branching and Merging Patterns

Development teams often create a branching pattern, usually drawn out on a white board or in a Visio document, that is used as a model to...

Automated Error Reporting We invite you to read a short e-zine that tells you all about automated error reporting for .NET applications. This 8-page e-zine is packed...

The End of Application Redeploys Imagine that every time you wanted to write, send or receive an email, you needed to restart your computer. How much time would this take, a...

Technorati

Digg

Slashdot

Facebook

Friendfeed

Twitter

del.icio.us

Agile for a new age The 12 principles of the Agile Manifesto still ring true, agree agile experts at IBM, Serena and training consultancies. But they offer different views on how agile development can work in today's development environment, where cloud computing, multicore and global projects add complexity.

IBM wants to make a ‘smarter planet’ From GPS to RFID, to medical devices and smart automobiles, software and hardware systems can provide more information than ever before. Today, IBM has released new and updated tooling to achieve the goal of better intelligence.

IBM boosts analysis features in collaborative platform Rational Quality Manager gives real-time data to software development teams, giving both developers and business professionals what they need to make informed testing decisions. The platform uses predictive algorithms to determine which software works best with which browsers.

Add comment

Name*
Email*
Country

Comment

Agile for a new age
The 12 principles of the Agile Manifesto still ring true, agree agile experts at IBM, Serena and training consultancies. But they offer different views on how agile development can work in today's development environment, where cloud computing, multicore and global projects add complexity Read More...

News on Monday
more>>
SharePoint Tech Report
more>>

Download Current Issue
MAY 2012 PDF ISSUE

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Want to subscribe?

Creation
To write better software, cultivate your ability to be creative.
05/19/2012 07:40 PM EST

Slick...but who needs it?
compilr.com is a well-designed site and the folks behind it seem to have their heart in the right place. But...who needs it?
05/16/2012 12:45 PM EST

How to be a better software developer
Want to be a better developer? You won't get there by mastering an interesting language or learning a new set of APIs.
05/14/2012 12:18 PM EST

Wooing Galatea
Do yourself a favor and check out Galatea 2.2, a wonderful book by novelist Richard Powers.
05/12/2012 07:05 PM EST

The world as story
An artificial-intelligence system at Carnegie Mellon seeks to understand the world by making statements about it.
05/10/2012 06:39 AM EST

The Rise of the Brogrammer, or the Rise of the Sexist Programmer?
Women in Silicon Valley get vocal about sexist ads and campaigns that contribute to a tense work environment.
05/09/2012 03:14 PM EST