Project management

Posted http://denver2012.drupal.org/program/sessions/building-beauty-deadline-project-management-development-multi-devi...

Building Beauty on Deadline: Project Management, Development, Multi-Device Theming, and Deployment When All Hands are On Deck

"practical advice for avoiding [delivering broken software with Scrum] – whether you’re an Organizer or you’re an Activist Developer"

The key problem identified is that incentive to abandon code quality to meet time/budget and feature goals.

The solution is to, first, not allow tests, in code, automated, or human, and other issues of code quality to be cut off from the features that are being built. Hide the time in the task estimates if absolutely necessary.

But also:

This does not remotely exist yet. Funding a point person to lead the project to make it, and creating or improving all the modules that would make it up, is a job for coordinating community initiatives- itself an initiative that could use support.

Chris Bryant of Gravitek
Matt Cheney of Chapter Three
Jenn Sramek of Civic Actions
moderated by Ron Huber of Achieve Internet

Ron:
[shops i consider role models]
i don't have them listed or ranked

most people were in the last presentation

in my opinion most [Drupal shops] are about the same size, under 40.

Ch3 = 27

Civic Actions - 37-40

Chris Bryant
gravitek - 10

Crystal Williams
http://badcamp.net/session/project-management-freelancers-round-2-contracts-and-estimation

MSA, Master Services Agreement is like an object-oriented contract

http://www.pragprog.com/magazines/2010-10/way-of-the-agile-warrior

This is in etc/trac/trac.ini. Note that each project can override in its own trac.inin (which for Agaric's system is in /srv/trac/PROJECTNAME/conf/trac.ini).

Summary: Great diversity in approaches, some common themes: choosing clients who are well-resourced and good to work with, getting a project manager, relentlessly working on internal communication whether in-person or virtual, and sharing everything good. Commoditization of Drupal skills is happening, and the Drupal ecosystem demands a lot of investment in giving stuff away. Being Drupal experts won't be enough to sustain the rates that sustain this, specialization required.