Telirati

Software projects and traditional project management tools have always been a dangerous combination. But, you can understand the attraction: Gantt and CPM chart editors can be a delightfully visual way to plan a project. Even a novice gets a thrill of insight and the feeling of control. Project management tools were originally made for creating big, expensive physical objects, like bridges, subway lines, and skyscrapers. These projects merited hiring professional project managers, and the nature of the projects left little room for ambiguity: Either 27 floors of steel are up, or not. Either the interior framing up to the 10th floor is ready for the electricians and plumbers, or not. In this world every measurement of task completion is represented by a physical object that can be directly inspected. Almost all the tasks in these physical-world projects have been done thousands, even millions of times before. Anomalies are relatively easy to spot, and few such anomalies are dangero...

You have a substantial budget. You have an army, perhaps a foreign mercenary army, of developers. You've got experience delivering big Web projects this way. But your Android project might as well be Afghanistan. Unexpected limitations, difficult bugs, poor performance, and bloat plague you for weeks and months. Android devices have become big, but Android is still for small, limited devices Some Android devices have become capacious and powerful. The processor benchmarks for flagship handsets rival processors commonly found in PCs. The RAM capacity in most phones is still less than half what you get in a typical PC, but that's still quite a lot. You have cross-trained some of your best Java experts on Android. They know how to engineer big Java projects. But you find unexpected problems. Why don't the same engineering approaches that work for your Web projects work for Android? The reason is that Android is, still, a clever little OS for clever little devices. A...