Effective project management: Controlling scope creep

We had a great Product Manager for our software project. The lady knew all her stuff, had a great rapport with the product support team and a direct contact with some of the larger customers for whom we did projects for. The design team liked how she was able to take the customer requirements and work with the design team to get the requirements into the required details that the High level design documents were able to be generated. Further, the past experience with her showed that she was available during the design and development phase for reviewing critical issues and for any consultation. 

However, inspite of all this, we used to run into issues near the scheduled completion date of our features. The team was always running and running to meet the schedule (even coming in some times during off days in order to meet the schedule - showed a good commitment for the over and beyond effort) and we never did miss the dates by more than a day, and with the required level of quality. During reviews, the team members would detail this problem out, asking repeatedly as to why this was allowed to happen since it meant a lot of extra effort for the team members and why we were not planning effectively. 

When this happened a few times, we decided to investigate more properly - after all, this could be a problem in the way we were doing the time and effort estimation, or maybe some team members were not pulling their weight. We got a couple of the more experienced leads to go ahead and they started combing through the documentation, and effort metrics to determine what was the problem. It was soon pretty clear that the time taken for coding, defect generation and fixing as well as for the earlier preparation of documents was not improper, but there were some cases where the effort overshot the estimation by around 20%. Now we were getting somewhere. However, this could not be isolated to some specific individuals, so there was a need to do a more detailed analysis.

Spoke to one person, spoke to another person, and so on. The surprising conclusion was that this was feature creep. As the people were preparing the design documents and then the development process, when there was a suggested improvement, either by the team members or the product manager, nobody really resisted, since this was apparently doing the right thing by the customer (and in a significant portion of the cases, the case for a small enhancement was put up by the product manager).

We spoke to more people, and although there were some standard design and development reasons for the effort-estimate mismatch, there were many cases where the feature creep was also causing problems. We had to make changes; you really cannot keep on pushing right upto your schedule without drastically increasing the risk of quality issues. We put in a new system  that once the requirements and design were frozen, any new changes, even if minor, would need to be tracked as a special category of defect, called a feature enhancement and these will not be approved unless the defect review team approved the changes.

This gave us a lot more insight about the kind of changes that were being requested, allowed future versions to track for changes made during the course of the project, and ensured a more detailed review of the changes, ensuring that there was no risk to quality. 

Don't hard-code URL's into the software or documentation

This is something that we discovered during the initial versions. We had placed some URL's into the documentation which pointed to some external resources. Then an year later, we got a defect logged into the system, a defect logged by a customer. This was a low level defect, about some URL in a Help Page that was not working, giving a 404 error. However, when the defect got to review, it was the tip of the iceberg, We realized that this had the potential for huge problems further ahead and we needed to change how we do things. Till now, we used to put URL's inside the software and documentation and so far had not seen any problem. However, in this case, the URL was pointing to the page of an external component help file and the external organization had changed the mapping on their site and hence the exiting URL would not work.
Now, this was a minor issue, but it was a pointer to something that was far more serious. There could be numerous reasons why a hard-coded URL might not work:
- Like in the above example, there could be linkages to external sites that are not in control
- Even internal sites could be a problem. We once had a change in the way that the Help file system was working because of a change in the software that they were using (the old software was out of date, and the new one promised a lot of advantages, so there was no option).
- Sometimes there is a change in the Help, and rather than spend a lot of effort to redo the various pages, it makes sense to update the link to point to new pages (which would take far less time).
There can be other advantages once you start thinking about, primarily the increased flexibility you get. So what is the solution ? The solution is to implement a policy of using URL redirects everywhere. What are URL redirects ? These are redirects that instead point to the end URL, but you can change the final destination anytime you want (the redirect is on an internal server and can be modified anytime).
The one thing you need to do is to ensure that you map every redirect URL, where it is used and the final destination on a file along with the date, some comments about what it is for, and who had asked for the redirect. This needs to be saved along with the other components of the code on a source safe kind system, and ensure that any changes to these redirects need to be done through the process of a defect mapping so that the entire information about why the change needed to be made can be mapped.
This policy adds a layer of extra effort, but anytime you need to make a change to the URL and you find that you are not able to make one because it has been hard-coded inside released software, you will realize the advantage of such a policy. 

Keeping up with security fixes / patches and the like

Every other day, you hear about some major security flaw letting hackers steal credit card information, steal passwords, social security numbers or something equally serious. Such news can seem remote, but not for the organization that gets impacted by such news. In such an organization, the impact of such security lapses can be shocking and dramatic, including people getting laid off and stock prices getting impacted (unless it is a mega-billion revenue earning organization which need earth shaking news to cause upheaval, small scale security scares are something that they are used to).
You might think that this is something that does not impact you too much, since nothing major has happened in the past and you are not likely to be the target of hackers. However, it is not necessary that hackers directly target you, but that there are some problems in the code that has been discovered that is not yet fixed (or fixed and not incorporated by customers) which can cause security related attacks. What is a likely scenario ?
Most large or even medium scale projects use external components for features that they need to deliver - my favorite example has been the use of decoders for handling the different image, audio and video formats, as well as the inbuilt capability within the Operating System. It is impossible for most applications to write their own software for such purposes, and they use external components for such purposes (paying a license fee or royalty or using free software for the same purpose). There are numerous other examples of the use of external components. Now, when you have incorporated an external component, it is practically a part of your own software and gets distributed with it.
If a security hole or some other such problem is there in the external component, then till the time it is patched and the patch is incorporated in your software and installed with components, there is an ongoing risk. It becomes even easier since there are numerous tools that become available which allow even non-hackers to exploit such holes or security issues.
So what is the method to reduce the risk of your customers getting impacted by such a problem? You can never entirely reduce the risk to zero, but there are a couple of strategies you can do to learn and handle the issue.
- Have a matrix of the various components you use, the critical nature of these components, is their usage such that they can be exposed for a security attack
- For each component, how would your team get informed that there is a new security flaw with the component, the severity of the flaw, when it is likely to get fixed and who is the person within your team who has the primary responsibility for evaluating any such flaw
- Detail the next step of action were such a flaw discovered. This would of course depend on the nature of the flaw, how likely it is to be exploited and other such factors, but you need to have a pre-defined strategy on how to respond (you cannot try to detail such strategies when the issue is faced, it can lead to a flawed execution)
- This one is more tricky. What should you do if the issue is found in the last released product / previous releases. This depends on the level of support you provide for previous fixes and the evaluation of the previous steps. For example, for a release that was done 2 versions back, if a small security flaw is found in an external component, and the presumed impact is minor, you may choose to not provide a fix
- Define a communication strategy for customers to let them know and to alleviate any concerns that they might have   

Partnership with an external party - quick prototyping / solution

A couple of years back, a major disaster took place. We had tied up with an external mobile based organization, larger than us, for providing a customized version of our software which would act as an entry point to their software. Such deals and partnerships happen all the time; the schedule was aggressive, but which schedule is not. Deals such as these are the life blood of a growing organization, since it helps develop partnerships and also builds credibility for other deals (even when the deal may be under an NDA, since you can still use such deals for other partnerships without revealing information that might break the NDA).
So, our marketing team along with their technical team (and a few points from us) managed to seal a deal and there were a lot of congratulations and happy faces. Since the schedule was aggressive, the work started right away. However, within a few days, as the proper design phase started, it became clear that there were problems involved in the probable design. The design changes needed were complex, the number of technical resources that were allocated were far less than the amount required after the design process was evaluated. And with the passage of time, it became clear that the process was only going to go downhill. It was an important collaboration and the organization was willing to add more resources, but the timeline was just not working out. After a series of frantic meetings, it was decided that rather than deliver an inadequate product, it was better to break the deal within time and still be able to maintain a relationship.
Given the importance of the deal and the critical nature of avoiding a situation like that in the future, there was a need to do a thorough analysis of where the problems lay. The analysis took some time, but it soon became clear that the level of interaction with the team that actually owned the product was very low and there was not enough time spent to figure out whether the solution was indeed feasible in the timeframe and with the amount of resources that could be committed. Now, this kind of problem had never been this severe in the past, but now that it had happened once, it became clear that it could occur again in the future. So, the relationship process had to be modified to include more time for a technical evaluation; if the contract was very large, then even a prototype may need to be built before such a contract can be signed off.

The importance of code walkthrough and reviews

When one studies software engineering, the importance of review like activities are actively mentioned. However, during the pressure of actual project work, there is always pressure to reduce the amount of time spent on these activities; in many cases, this is something that the project manager might push. And there are a number of such review activities that happen during the course of the project. Here are some example:
- Requirements / Design review: During the process of detailing the requirements, there is a need to do a review of the requirements to ensure that the requirements cover the entire feature needs and is  comprehensive. When the design process is done, there is a need for experienced design folks to review the design documents / architectural documents and related documents to ensure that the best possible solution is designed. In a number of projects that I have seen, such reviews typically are very value enhancing and can add a lot of improvements to the design documents.
- Test plans / test cases review: Once the design documents have been prepared, the testing documents get into high gear (in many cases, the test plan document would be started before the design documents have been completed). The testing process is critical to weed out all the defects / improper features in the software; if the test plans and cases are not comprehensive, then there would be problems with the software. Hence, a comprehensive review would be necessary, in many cases with the developer also participating.
- Code walkthrough: Code walkthrough is not done for all the code, typically done for the more critical sections of the code. In addition, as the software development process nears the end, this process gets more critical. There have been cases where a defect fix has failed, and caused more problems for the team in trying to figure out what went wrong. The advantages for a code walkthrough are very high.
- Defect review: This is not something that happens in all cases. What happens in many projects is that when a defect is written, it goes to a defect review committee that reviews whether the defect is valid, whether it has the proper severity and priority, and also whether it needs to be fixed. The committee can then decide whether to actually allocate the defect for fixing. This kind of process does add some overhead to the defect process, but can help prevent some defects from getting fixed which are not needed, and also whether the proper allocation of defects to people.
- Defect fix review: This can be critical, especially with defect fixes that touch core areas of the design or the architecture and need a proper review. This overlaps with the code walkthrough as well, but to ensure that the defects are properly fixed, this part of the process is critical.

One can quibble about the amount of time needed for such process work, but the need for reviews at different stages is critical and needs to be done. 

Coordination with external teams - regular meetings to track progress and status

Sometimes when I review some of the posts that I create, it seems like something that is so obvious, why would there be a need to even create such a post; everybody would already know this. And then, one comes across cases where it becomes clear that some people do not really know the contents of the post, that they get into problems which have been described in some of the posts. So the idea of such posts is that people read these, see whether this applies to their current situation, and work out any changes if required. If they are doing things superior to what is being written about in the post, then I would be really grateful if they can update in the comments.
For any team that has been working for some time, especially in the area of product development, there will always be the need for working with external parties. These can be other teams within the organization that depend on your product, or provide you with a component. There can be teams outside the organization with whom you are coordinating with for either inputs or outputs. For example, a simple case was whereby the marketing team had made a deal with a phone manufacturer for loading the product as a pre-loaded application on the phone (yes, the same type of product that many reviews call bloatware, and which users sometimes are unable to uninstall when they get the phone in their hands).
You might think that this is a simple transaction, you provide the product to them and they incorporate it into their phone, with schedules being the major tracking. However, life is not so easy many times. In many cases, we have had to add tracking parameters to the product which let us monitor how many times users loaded the product that was on the phone (as opposed to getting the same product from another source, or buying from us, and so on). All of this requires coordination (and there can be numerous cases where such type of changes and coordination needs to happen).
When you are dealing with teams that are outside of your organization, you should never make the mistake of assuming that they work with the same culture as teams within your organization.
Coordinating with such teams needs to ensure a proper system of tracking requirements, changes, issues, closing issues, defects, status and setting the grounds for acceptability testing (to ensure that both teams are in agreement over what is needed to finally state that the product is good to go).
- There is a need to define responsibilities and contact details, who does what on either side
- With these responsibilities, a further need to map ongoing work to people along with timelines and what the output should be like
- Set up regular meetings for discussing ongoing issues, working through the schedule, deliverables, action items, and escalations
- As work proceeds, define the changing mix of people involved in the discussions (for example, earlier states may have a mix of development and marketing people, and later, when work is ongoing, more of development and testing people from both sides)

This is the general idea of how you go about working with people from outside your organization; the exact granular details of this coordination would vary from team to team, and from project to project.

Giving time for the testing effort

The testing process is one of the most fundamental parts of a software project. Any software that is built (or modified) would have defects in it. Even the most confident of software developers and the most skilled would admit that there will be defects that creep in when they are writing their code (in fact, the best ones are a part of the testing effort, working closely with the testing team to ensure that the team fully understands what all has been done so that they can do their best to tweak all the defects out). So it is well understood that there is a need for testing in order to deliver a high quality item to the end customer; and the process of testing tries to ensure that most of the high severity defect are found out and fixed during the process.
The challenges come in terms of ensuring that there are enough resources for the testing process and the amount of time required for the testing process is also there. There can be a lot of pushback on this front from the project managers and others in the management team, since the development and testing schedules do take up a significant amount of the overall project cycle. From my experience, there is a fair amount of pressure on the test team leaders about pulling in their estimates and trying to get that part of the project done early. If you speak to some of these testing guys, their common refrain is that management typically (in a majority of cases) do not have people that came from a testing background and hence do not really understand the work we do, and hence we get pressured a lot.
So what is the way out to ensure that the testing estimates are accepted, even though there may be some rounds of discussion and some estimates may be refined (could be reduced, or in the off case, during the process of estimation and discussion, there may be some upwards estimation of the estimates as well). Well, like many other issues that come up during estimation and planning, there would be some amount of rigor combined at the same time with some amount of rough estimates.
How does  rough estimate come up ? Well, if you have experienced testing leaders, when they look through the requirements (at a top level, since detailed requirements may not exist, but summary requirements would be there), they would be able to give a fairly good and rough estimate for the testing effort required, which can be broken down into number of people for the desired schedule.
Another way is to see similar projects (a lot of projects in large organizations can be similar, which gives a good idea of the testing efforts for a new project, at least as a good point for comparison purposes).
The effort is in preparing detailed testing estimates by taking the different requirements, breaking them down into test plans (more detailed test cases may not be possible given the state of requirements at this point of time). Some amount of rigorous review of these plans would give a very good consolidated testing requirement, both for the testing effort estimation and for later needs when these test plans would form the basis for preparing more detailed test cases.

Interaction between product manager and usability expert

The product manager plays a role throughout the product development or the projectexecution cycle. The product manager delivers requirements, discusses them with the feature teams, collaborated and provides clarifications during the design phrase and also plays a key role during the development and testing cycles - defining what the flow for the feature should be case there is a lack of clarity among the development team (and there will typically be some small part or element of the workflow or the screens or the UI that may not have been well detailed during the requirements or design process and needs the inputs of the product manager); in addition, most Product Managers I know would do extensive testing of the product, primarily of new features or features that were modified; and also spent time in the beta programs, discussing with the beta users about specific features or providing clarification or passing on the more severe defects.
The usability expert does not play that extensive a role throughout the cycle, but in the initial phases of the cycle, the inputs of the usability expert are critical. I remember a particular cycle in which we were doing a comprehensive redesign of the product, based on a summary of user issues and requests over the past few versions, and also because the product UI looked dates and needed to be modified to seem better and fresher (and those are somewhat nebulous concepts, but you would not believe how well these concepts sound when you pitch the idea to senior management). In such a case, the flow of ideas between the product manager and the usability expert was something that started way before the requirements phase; in fact these could start before the previous version was done and out of the gate.
The usability expert and the product manager have a set of inputs that help them as they start their process, and for larger products, the number of screens that they have could be considerable, so they do need to prioritize. These inputs would be -
- Complaints and suggestions by customers and on the user forums (especially if these get mentioned a lot),
- Inputs from the usability expert and the product manager themselves (if you show product screens to a usability expert, you can be sure that they will have their opinions on the workflow plus and minuses of certain screens, and the product manager typically has a list of peeves about some screens in the product),
- Technical changes that require a modification to an existing screen or make an improvement possible. It is possible that the components used for screen design have gone through certain changes, which in turn ensures that the screen needs modification or maybe there was a certain workflow that was desired but was not technologically possible, but is possible now
- And there could be some other inputs that also lead to screen or UI modifications
The process is somewhat cyclical, with the expert typically laying down a new desired workflow, which would be commented on by the Product manager and sometimes by the product team, and based on these discussions, a new iteration would be made. Because this may need to be done over many UI screens or workflows, the creative mind of a usability expert may do this screen by screen, rather than working over several screens at the same time, thus ensuring that different product teams can get started. This is where the Product Manager can prod and work with the usability expert, atleast being able to detail out preliminary requirements that can be fully detailed out by the usability expert. It can be a challenge for the Project Manager to handle this kind of scheduling, but cooperation with the Product Manager can help make this smoother.

Presentation - who should do the presentations ...

In previous posts, I have talked about the kind of data, graphs and slides one should use in a presentation, especially when the presentation is being made to people who are in a more senior position. One has to be careful about what to present, presenting a top level summary and not doing an overkill with data, and yet having backup data and graphs for the queries that might come (it always comes off well if you have data on your tips, or have access to the data on your finger tips and goes a long way in generating a more positive impression).
The next important question is about who should do the presentation. And for a question such as this, there is no correct answer. It really depends on a number of circumstances, depends on the members of the team, and so on. Here are some points to ponder over:
- Importance of the presentation: Sometimes the presentation is really significant; for example when a new project is being launched and the kickoff means that senior executives would be present. In such a case, one really needs to have the best foot forward, and there is no question of trying out different members of the team in order to get them more presentation experience. If you were going to kick-start a project and the meeting was a review meeting, the presenter needs to be the best person for the job. On the contrary, if this is a regular meeting (many such meetings can be standard meetings where not much changes are expected but are a part of the regular schedule), one can try to get different team members to present either the whole stuff or break it up into different parts done by different team members. There is no real problem in even starting out by the meeting by introducing the team members and explaining the people who would be doing the presentation.
- Inclination: In every team, there will be people who are interested in doing such presentations because it gets them noticed and known by people outside the team especially if they come across as confident and knowledgeable. On the opposite side, there will be people in the team who are really not interested in doing presentations, and this is not something that one can force somebody into.
- Specific ability: Sometimes there is the need to fit a specific ability to the need of the situation. There could be a team member who is very good at data, at being able to understand the different data points as well as analysis of data and different permutations and combinations of data (this would be very useful when this is a review meeting that goes into detail into coding data or defect analysis); on the other hand, when you have a meeting that talks about project starting and about the various options and variables, about customer inputs, you need somebody who is more clear about the requirements, about the options in this, about what the customers think like, and so on. Everybody would know some details, but there are always some specific team members who are more fluent in different parts of the project, and one should always try and match these abilities, unless it is a really routine meeting.

Focusing on the usability and ease of reading

Recently. I was driving past a gas station next to the highway, one that I had passed by earlier and this time saw a new board announcing some new eating options. Given the speed at which I was driving, I would normally be able to read the signs on the board, but the lettering was in a fancy script where I was not able to read it (or rather, it would have taken more time to read it than the time I had while driving past it). I asked the other people in the car whether they were able to read the names of the outlets that were on the sign, and none of them were able to read in the short duration of time that we had while passing by. This was not true of other signboards that were in plain simple script, not some fancy script.

While reliving this experience, my experience in an IT industry came to the fore, all the discussions with the usability experience and the discussions with the usability expert came to the front. If the gas station signboard was written after consulting with an experience expert, then they would have realized the use case and had the sign board written in a way that people could read it while passing by and maybe be attracted enough to stop by before they passed the place. 

And this is what usability is all about. While doing the design of any new user screens or even when looking at the redesign of an existing screen or user facing UI, or anything similar, it is always important to look at how this will look at the users. When the design is being done by the people behind the development and testing team along with the product manager, it is necessary that it be consulted with a usability expert. It is important to emphasize this point because there have been so many cases where the people that have been working on the product for so long feel that they know what the customer wants and will resist what a usability expert emphasizes on (there are specific examples I know where the usability expert has recommended changes in the workflow or the screen, and the development team has not been able to appreciate the changes or are very resistant to these changes).

One way to make sure that the development team understand the need for usability is to get the team members looking at user forums or defects logged by customers, as well as getting them to actively looking at beta programs and interacting with the users - this can get them to quickly change their perspective of what is important for the product.

Presentations - what data to present and how (contd..)

In the previous post (Data and graphs in a presentation), we talked about some of the data elements and graphs that would be shown in a presentation; such information is generated from a number of factors, the level to which these need to be shown as well as the detail depends on the audience of the presentation.
In this post, we talk about something that needs careful planning while making a presentation. When you have information and are able to show data and make great graphs, there is a tendency in most cases to do over-kill by trying to present too much data in the form of graphs. This is especially problematic when you are presenting to people who are senior to you and really do not have the time or the effort to go through multiple graphs that are presenting information that is similar. For example, if you are presenting on the current status of your project, especially with respect to the development phase of your project, the maximum focus would be on the defects - and there can be incredible amounts of data that is generated during this phase. For you and your colleagues who are working day in and day out on these defects, a lot of the data may seem relevant. But if you try and present too many graphs, even if they are packaged in a great way, it would still be over-kill. I have seen a case where the audience soon started saying, "Next, next" as soon as they saw another graph.
Such a reaction from an audience means that you have practically lost them. You have to focus on the key data details that you need to present (and I am not trying to tell you what this key data is); talk to your colleagues, get presentations made by other teams, talk to somebody who is more senior and would have attended such presentations, and so on. Make sure that you have done this homework. In one presentation, I saw around 15 different graphs on defects and defect resolution, this was way too much.
Try to finalize on a small number of graphs that you will have in your presentation, it is fine for you to have more detailed graphs in another presentation or in another appendix. There is a small chance that somebody will ask for more data or will get curious about another metric, and having that graph handy shows that you are well prepared and ready for the presentation (at the same time, don't go overboard and have dozens and dozens of graphs ready, those don't give that good an impression though). In fact, during the presentation, you can talk about the key data points for which you are presenting graphs and mention that there are additional graphs available if somebody wants more data (and these graphs should typically be those that your team is anyhow generating for keeping track of defect or coding or other metrics).

Presentations - what data to present and how

This topic is actually a full book, since it depends on the type of presentation, the target audience, etc. For example, if you are presenting to senior management, you would try to keep bullet points and graphs of data along with conclusions (and keep all the detailed information on your fingertips since you would not know who could ask what question about which part of the presentation). If you are presenting to colleagues and team members, high level summary may still be presented, but a lot more data analysis, a lot more talking about the data analysis, shortcomings, etc need to be talked about - in some cases, follow up meetings with select members of the audience may need to be set as well. When people ask questions, the questions may be more exact about specific points of the data or the analysis and it helps to have all the information as required on your finger tips.
However, suppose we are planning the presentation, need to figure out what kind of data to present, what are the graphs that may be required, all of these need to be figured and finalized before the data needs to be presented. There are many ways in which this sort of initial presentation needs to designed.
- Design what is the information you need to present, which in turn drives the data elements you need to have as part of your graphs. For example, if you are presenting on the current status of an ongoing project, one important data point would be the number of defects that are being found and fixed over a period of time. There may be ways of presenting this data in terms of the actual graph, including contrasting with similar data from previous versions, but you have an idea of the data points that need to be there in the graphs.
- Discussions with fellow presenters. In our case, when we had to make a presentation, it was on behalf of the team, so the fellow presenters would be colleagues (I was a project manager, so involved other other project managers, involved the heads of the development and testing team) with whom you could have extensive discussions on what is the kind of information or data points that need to be presented, along with the level of detail.
- In a number of cases (atleast in my case), my boss was ultimately the person assigned the responsibility for the team, so even though we would be making the presentation, the boss held a fair degree of responsibility. You can be sure that if your presentation made some boo-boo, there might be some (or many) uncomfortable words with the boss and a loss in the amount of trust that was given to you.

Once you are done with the kind of data to show as well as the kind of graphs and data analysis, there needs to be atleast a couple of presentations with the team and the boss as a sort of practise runs. You would not believe how a very confident team, well happy with their presentation, was shaken with some of the questions (genuine ones) that somehow needed a modification of the presentation, whether these be the graphs or the talking points.

Ensuring you are kept in the loop for communication

Recently I got an email from another program manager, the lady was somewhat junior to me in the sense of actual title, but we were both doing the same role (and eventually that is what matters after all, not a title). She was in charge of a team that delivers some modules for a project that our team uses, and we have been working with her team in the past for several deliveries, and the coordination between our team and theirs was working well.
With a new request, one of our senior developers started a discussion with another senior developer from the other team, and this discussion continued for some time between these 2 developers and eventually the developer from our team included me in the discussion. I put in my comments, talked about the schedule and so on, and did not take the elementary step of including the program manager from the other team. It was around a week later that she found out that she was not being included in a discussion about the features, deliveries, and so on. And then she sent me an email asking as to why she was not being included in the discussions about a delivery that her ground was eventually going to be tasked with making. I am sure she was having a similar discussion with the developer from her group. I had no great answers for this one other than stating that it was a mistake and she should have been included in the discussion.
This is a tricky point, about the level of involvement in discussions and the point at which it should start. The dynamics of this varies from group to group, with some groups having the program manager or the project manager coming in only when actual scheduling or commitments need to be made and the developers having the experience to continue discussions and only bring in the program manager at a much later stage; for other groups the dynamics could be different - when the PgM or the PM needs to come in is not a reflection of the values or maturity of a group, it is just how the dynamics of the group have become established.
However, there is no denying the fact that the PgM or the PM does need to be involved at a certain stage; there are many factors that require inputs from the PgM which the developer may not have. At a very extreme level, the team may have been directed to do some other work, and hence would not be able to cater to any request; or there may be scheduling conflicts or resource conflicts and it is typically the PgM who is in a position to look at these conflicts and then work these out in coordination with others. Further, once the discussions reach a certain stage, there may be the need for regular interactions between more than just these developers and somebody needs to track the agreements and action items from these interactions or meetings. There could be a multitude of reasons why the PgM or the PM needs to get involved, and it is best if the person gets included and they then can figure out their level of involvement at different stages of the discussion.

Ensuring resources are allocated for the next version

The process of  resource (in this post, we are talking about people) allocation during the process of product development is tricky, and because there are high costs associated with the same, it requires careful planning, and sometimes circumstances can throw such planning out of the window.
For projects, where people are assembled for a specific one-off project, the situation is slightly simpler. There is a proper schedule for the project, and that project schedule defines when what resources is required for the project and this can be done with the identification of resources and their allocation to the project at the required time (or it can be done in a staggered manner with part work on their existing project and slowly taking up more work on the new project until they are fully on the new project).
However, consider the case of product development where versions of the product are released after a periodic cycle. For simplicity, consider the case where the product is released every year, say in October. During the course of the year, the resource requirements are not static. At the start of the cycle, during the requirements phase, the need for resources is lower, it increases during the design phase and can be maximum during the cycle of develop, test, fix; it is during this time that the phrase 'all hands on deck' is most suitable. But as development and testing starts to taper down, the product team needs to simultaneously start work on the next version. Identification of new features, the most critical fixes, interactions with customers to identify those features or changes that are highly needed by customers all happen during this time phrase, which usually does start before the previous version has shipped.
Even the use of more complicated requirements and workflow design involving prototyping, developing sample user interfaces, and so on, is something that takes time. If these are attempted to be started after the previous version has shipped, it will eat up the development and design time for the next phase. The problem is in terms of assigning more accomplished developers and some testers for this effort, since there will be need for simultaneous working on critical defects and so on. However, teams that have been working on multiple versions over the years have learned how to do this; the amount of resource allocation needs to be fluid, with people moving from one version to another during the course of the week, or even during the course of a work day (with the intention that these changes are not too chaotic, since that could unnerve even the most rational of people). The program / project manager, the leads and the product manager need to handle this process carefully, being careful not to fluster the people working on this too much and it will work just fine. 

True status in the status report

The status report can be a very important document, or it can be just something that is created as a matter of routine. I remember 2 very differing usages in 2 different situations - in one case, the status report was reviewed by many members of management and they had queries on some of them, which reassured us that the status report was valued and was being viewed. However, it also brought on a feeling to recheck the report before it was sent out that it was accurate and that the information presented the status as of that point, not an optimistic or a pessimistic portrayal, but an accurate portrayal.
Another case was in an organization that had different types of process certification, and part of that certification was about ensuring that every project generated status reports of different types which were sent to a central project management office; the idea being that anybody could find the status report of any project and review it for whatever timeline. The problem I could see after a few weeks was that the project manager was drowning in the various status reports that were required to be generated, and it was pretty clear that most management would not have the bandwidth to be able to review more than a couple at any detail.
However, the subject of this post is actually more about the accuracy of the status report. Right in the beginning, when I was more of a novice project manager with a few months experience, I would work with the leads to generate a status report - the problem was with the level of maturity of everyone involved. Most people tend to see issues in a status report as something that reflects on their way; so initially the status report would contain the issue, but also with a sugar coating about what the team was doing. The lesson I got one day was from a senior manager who had a discussion with me. His feedback was that the status report was supposed to report the issues as they were along with what the team could do to overcome them, not a sugar coating. The issues were needed to be represented accurately, including in those cases where the issues could pose potential red risks to the project and needed some kind of immediate attention (whether these be from within the team or needed attention from people outside the team, such as an external team on which there was a dependency).
This can get tricky. I remember the first time when I generated a status report with a red item, I got called into a discussion with the leads of development and testing and my boss, who were not very happy with the fact that a issue was listed in red. The expectation was that any red issue would be handled so that it was no longer red, but I held my ground. What we did finalize was that the day before my status report, or sometimes on the same day, I would do a quick communication if I saw a red item and we could discuss it. That did not mean that I would remove it unless I was convinced that my understanding was unfair and it was not red. This seemed to work for the future for this team at least.

Ensuring the major features are delivered to testing early

Sometimes when I am writing these posts, and review the content once I have done the post; it seems like I am writing about the most obvious of topics. But you won't believe the number of projects where there has been discord between the team members with the QE team complaining about features being given late, those features which had a huge testing impact; and a significant number of end of project review meetings talk about how to ensure that major features are given early enough in the cycle that it is shaken out as thoroughly as possible much before the final deadlines.
What is this ? Well, when you are doing a software project cycle, in most cases, there will be some features that are more substantial than the others. It need not be a user facing dialog or screen, for example, it could be some kind of engine that works in the background but has a huge impact on the product (for example, in an accounting software, it could be the tax calculation code that is a huge part of the product, or for a Photoshop kind of software, it could be the graphics engine that works in the background), or it could be a brand new feature that is supposed to be the selling point of the new version of the software.
In such cases, the future of the product is dependent on making sure that these significant features / engines / code are thoroughly shaken out and tested and major and medium level defects are found and fixed, and fixed much in advance so that these defects are not left for the last parts of the cycle (unfortunately in many cases of software cycles, even with the best of intentions (not planning), these features can drag right till the end).
There is a problem inherent in all this. When you have a new feature or new engine or something that is new, there is the chance that there will be more defects than in a feature that has existed from earlier and where a lot of testing may have already happened. Some of these may be severe enough that the product cannot be released until these defects have been found and tested.
Another problem is that for new features, even with the best written cases and requirements, there is the possibility of disagreement between the development and QE team about a specific workflow, which could be something as minor as the exact wording of an error message or the case in which it appears. Such disagreements can be easily resolved by the Product Manager, but all of these take time and contribute to potential delay in actual completion of the feature.
Further, such major changes have a higher impact on the localization and documentation aspects of the product, and until the feature is fully ready and all medium and major defects have been found and fixed, these aspects cannot be fully resolved and too much delay will have an impact on the overall schedule of the project.
Now, all of this does not mean that it is going to be easy for these major features to be fully delivered early; there may be schedule or dependency issues that will delay the feature, but the planning should try to ensure that the feature is delivered as early as possible, and if it can be broken into parts which can still be tested to some reasonable level of confidence, one should target such a plan. Don't ignore this issue. 

Costs of taking last minute defect fixes

You know what I am talking about. I even hinted in the last couple of posts about the dangers and problems involved in this situation. It is like a Hobson's choice, no matter what you do, there is no clear right answer. Here are some cases for the same:
- You are a week away from the date when you cease the cycle of testing and fixing, when the product goes into the process of wrapping up the development activities and into the release set of processes. The testing team, by this time, would have wrapped up the major testing cases and would be carrying out the last stage of testing, with the hope that no major defect pops up at this point of time. And would you believe it, there is a major defect that does indeed emerge; restest confirms that the defect is reproducible, the defect review committee looks at the defect, but at this late stage, decides that it wants details in terms of what is the proposed fix, what are the code changes; wants the code changes to be reviewed by multiple people and wants the change in a private build so that it can be tested thoroughly before it is integrated into the main branch. And even with all this, it can seem dicey since a major change has the potential to create instability into the entire system and code base.
Such a change coming just a few weeks would have been implemented easily enough.
- Now we get into the critical milestone timelines. Just a day is left before the wrapping of the testing and defect fixing stage, and then you get such a defect. Everybody remember's Murphy's Law (if anything can go wrong, it will) at this stage and the possibility that such a defect is deferred or pushed into release notes with the possibility of being fixed in the next release or in a dot release is actively thought through. However, every defect cannot be deferred; some defects can make a product crippled, or at some workflow in the product seem crippled and with the potential of a section of the users giving it a negative rating or hollering at product support and in user forums, you have to take the possibility that at this late stage, defects will still need to be fixed. You have to go through the same process that you can went through when you looked at the defect if it was found a week before, but you need to put more resources on this review and try to speed it up. Further, if there is an internal milestone that is getting impacted, you try to work out whether you can move the internal milestone without impacting the product release date (but this is not a single person decision, needs to move through a few layers of management before getting approval; if your team has a good reputation, it is easier to get approval). And you still have to work out whether there is an impact on the documentation team and the localization teams and what will be the impact, how much their schedule will get impacted.
And you need to get a proper review done about whether there was a way to get such a defect found earlier, so as to hopefully avoid the kind of panic that you went through in this late stage. 

Avoiding ascribing blame for last minute defects without a review

As a software development team reaches the last stages of the development project, the tension levels in the team can suddenly change drastically, mostly increase. There is an anticipation that something may go wrong, something can change the milestones and deadlines. When the team reaches the days before the completion of the development and testing stage, every day of testing brings forth an anticipation, with the leads and managers of the team hoping that the testing is thorough, but that no major defect comes through that could impact the deadlines. 

Any major or high severity defect that comes through near the end deadline has a potential severe impact; the risk of not making a fix is that you release a buggy product, but any fix has the potential to cause an undesired change in functionality or introduce another defect, something that may not be captured easily. With the pressure of deadlines looming, unless more time is given, code reviews and impact testing can try and give the confidence that there are no adverse affects of the fix, but there is always a risk.

What I have seen is that this tension causes people to start flipping out when things start going wrong. So for example, there was a case where a young tester found a severe defect almost near the end of the cycle, and there was no getting around the impact. There was a need to make a fix, evaluate the impact of the fix, do multiple code review cycles and use multiple testers to check the impacted areas, and, and, there was a pushing out of the deadlines by a couple of days. One of the senior managers was very irritated by this, and dressed down the QE lead about why the defect was not caught earlier, almost blaming the QE team for not doing the job thoroughly.

Once the release was done, there was a review team that went through the various development and testing documents, and realized that there was a mixup right from the start, from the developer design documents that were in turn used by the QE team for making their test cases. It was a lucky adhoc test that found the defect. As a byproduct of this review, the senior manager was also advised that such kind of blaming does not help and can end up discouraging those team members who were only doing their jobs, and that too in a proper manner. 

Defining single point responsibilities for decision making during a software cycle

It seems like a simple management issue, having single point responsibilities for different functions, but you would amazed at the number of teams that stumble on this issue when at a critical point in their schedule. Consider the case where a team is coming to a point where they have to declare whether they are now clear of all major discovered defects (no team can find and fix all known defects, it is an impossible task, the amount of effort involved in trying to detect all bugs starts increasing exponentially once you reach a certain point). At this point, many teams start working on adhoc testing, others start the process of release of the product to the consumer, and so on. It is a major milestone for the product.
But who takes a call that they are clear of all major defects. The key word here is 'major'. As long as testing is going on, there will always be issues coming up, and they have to be dealt. Depending on who see the defects, the classification of whether an issue is major or not can be dealt with differently, even with the best of defect classification criteria in place.
I remember an issue from a couple of decades back. Almost at the last stage, when the team was ready to close down the defect finding and defect fixing, a defect came up. It was an interesting defect since it was serious, but covered a small workflow that many considered a non-serious workflow, and some of the team members were fine delaying it for a later dot release (the team was in the process of releasing periodic dot releases, so such defects could go into the dot releases).
At that point, during the day, we realized were were going around in circles, trying to figure out whether it should be fixed and we take another build (with the subsequent testing of that build again) or we defect it and take it up later. There were strong opinion for both in the managers and leads in the team. We realized that we had never worked out the appropriate decision making process for cases such as this, and suddenly giving the decision making for this to one person could have caused tension within the team. Ultimately we had to setup a meeting of the senior leaders of the team to thrash through a decision, taking into account the costs and the impact (both for and against the decision).
The learning we had from this kind of case was we need to better refine the process of having decision makers for specific situations - in this case, for the next time, we made the testing manager as the decision maker about whether a defect that came up in the last minute was of a sufficient severity to be needed for fixing, with the concept that if the QA manager did recommend such a defect, they should also be able to justify the severity of such a defect later.

Software product localization - there may be base product changes

For somebody (people or teams) who have experience in releasing software products in multiple languages, they would typically have gone through a lot of learning in terms of how the nuances of different languages can cause changes in the base language product (in our case, and in most cases, the base language product is in English, and the product can be released in many other languages, for larger software products such as Operating Systems or MS Office or Photoshop, these can be many many languages).
However for a team that has so far been releasing software products in one base language and have now moved to try and release their product in other languages, it can be a fairly complex project. In simplistic terms, it is to make sure that all the strings used in the product (whether these be text on screens or on dialogs or error messages, etc) are all capable of being harvested, sent for translation and then reincorporated back into the product depending on the language in which the product is being released.
Based on this simple concept, things get more complicated as you proceed towards actually doing the project. There are additional schedule requirements, there is a lot more work for the developers since testing a product for localization reveals many changes that are required, there is the need to get external people who can do the testing of the product in the different languages (the language needs to be checked, as well as the functionality of the various parts of the product under different languages), and many other changes need to be planned (this post is not meant to be a full description of the process of getting a product localized for the first time - that is a massive endeavor that requires a lot of explanation). As an example, a simple text on an error message may turn out to be much longer in a language such as Russian or German, or reading from right to left in Arabic or Hebrew, and the error message may not display properly in such cases. Either the message needs to be re-written or the error message box needs to be re-sized, which also has implications for the help manuals that may need to be modified.
Ideally, a team planning to get their product localized for the first time needs to avail of the learning that other teams and products have gained over their cycles, and so either need to hire some people with the required experience for both development and testing, or atleast get a thorough discussion with teams that have done this. Getting a product localized for the first time is not that big a effort and can be done right, but it is also not something that you attempt without ensuring that you have done adequate preparation in terms of schedule and resources. Once you have done that level of planning, then you will still face challenges, but those should be fixable.