Disqus - Latest Comments for dvansant

Re: 25 Sure-fire Ways To Motivate Your Team Members

dvansant — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:54:46 -0000

Most of these tips, if not all, apply to the leadership of any type of team. Thanks Bas, it may be time to add "Leadership Guru" to your title ;-)

Re: Software Requirements Management

dvansant — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:28:50 -0000

There are volumes of research reports online that support your assertion that poor requirements are the most frequent cause of project failures. Collaboration among stakeholders is key to delivering good requirements. You also touch on requirements traceability. Far too often requirements are written in a text document that sits on an island, separated from other project artifacts. Tracing these requirements through the application life cycle becomes a manual and error prone process. Getting requirements right is a good start, but is insufficient if you can’t trace them to make sure, for example, that all requirements have been successfully tested.

A good tool is a worthy investment to help with the collaboration, documentation, version control, and traceability issues that plague text documents. I certainly understand the lure of a text document when faced with the alternative of a five or six figure requirements management solution, but today there are several good web-based options that can deliver a lot of value for free or a small price.

To deliver real-time automated traceability, we’ve taken the approach of delivering requirements management in the context of the entire application life cycle. Requirements can be linked to any other project artifact and then traced at any moment by running a report. Our solution, Lighthouse, is free for 5 users.

http://www.artifactsoftware...

Whether you choose our tool or not, I would urge readers to move beyond text documents and seek something that meets their needs. Requirements are so important to a project’s success and should be managed accordingly.

Thanks to SoftwareProjects for the Software Requirements section!

-Derek

Re: Free Project Management Software

dvansant — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 09:52:24 -0000

This has grown into a pretty nice list of what's available in the marketplace. I'd like to add Artifact Software's "Lighthouse", an online project workspace that blends together project management and lifecycle management capabilities, providing a single reliable source for software project data and making traceability easy.

A free version is available for 1 project and 5 users. You can view demos or create your free account at www.artifactsoftware.com.

Lighthouse includes gantt charts and resource leveling and modules to manage requirements, test cases, defects, change requests, issues, documents, timesheets, and much more.

Thank you for the the opportunity to share Lighthouse.

-Derek
Artifact Software