Building Better Software

As a group, we developers have a project tracking problem: the problem is that we constantly, almost obsessively want to track our projects, and it’s made worse by the fact that it’s so easy to abuse otherwise great tools like JIRA and Bugzilla. Unfortunately, while tracking projects may feel useful and productive, for most teams it’s just busywork – and it can lead to a self-imposed exercise in needless bureaucracy that just wastes our time. But with a few ground rules, you can escape the project tracking trap and use a tracking tool effectively.

Some projects just go wrong. It’s a fact of life. Projects go over budget, blow their schedules, squander their resources. Sometimes they go off the rails so spectacularly that there’s nothing you can do except (literally) pick up the pieces and try to learn whatever lessons you can so you don’t repeat the failure in [...]