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Notes from Andy’s Presentation


Preventing Crisis: Project Estimation and Tracking That Works

Andy Lester

When: October 25th, 2005, 6:00 – 8:00 pm

Where: Atomic Object, 941 Wealthy Street SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49506

Crisis is always bad, even when you manage to solve the problem. Crisis always reflects poorly on you and your department.

It’s almost a truism that development crises happen, but you don’t have to work in a Dilbertesque hellhole. Crisis prevention must be an integral part of everything you and your department do. You’ll learn how to:

  • Keep management off your back so you can get real work done.
  • Make honest schedules everyone can live with.
  • Track your progress effectively to avoid 11th hour rushes.
  • Stop your project from stalling, or sliding backwards.
  • Handle change requests without stress.
  • Go from scapegoats to rock stars.

These techniques have all been proven under fire, and draw from a number of methodologies.

Andy Lester, Author and Consultant

Andy Lester (PetDance) has been a professional programmer for nineteen years and Perl evangelist for a decade. As one of the core Perl developers, Andy’s interests in Perl focus on quality assurance. He maintains eight testing modules on the CPAN, as well as the Perl QA website (http://qa.perl.org). Andy is a frequent speaker at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, YAPC, and at Perl Monger meetings around the country. He’s spoken around the US on a variety of programming topics including automated testing, Perl security, web agent automation, project management, and effective job searching for programmers. Andy has written or edited for a dozen books. Three of his articles on his popular WWW::Mechanize module are included in O’Reilly’s “Spidering Hacks”. Andy has also written articles for every single Perl magazine published in the US (both of them). By day, Andy manages a crack squad of web programmers for Follett Library Resources (http://www.titlewave.com) in McHenry, Illinois. He lives with his wife Amy, daughter Quinn, and Baxter, the world’s neediest dog.