Time Cockpit Blog

Architects call the central idea or concept of a building "parti". You can think of parti as the big idea behind an architectural design. Without a parti, agile and iterative development can quickly ruin your software's architectural design. Read more about the concept of the parti and how it translates to software.  Read more ...

In the last few months, I have recognized a rising problem in software development teams on the Microsoft platform. They are panting as they try to keep up with new release of the components and tools they use. Every day new announcements arrive. A constant fear from getting out-of-date forces them to follow the respective team blogs, twitter accounts, news sites, etc. This is not only consuming more and more time. It also places mental stress on development teams.  Read more ...

In many companies, each year starts with planning. Planning the financial aspects of your business is one part of that process. In this blog article I would like to share our thoughts about creating and continuously controlling our budget. Of course, time cockpit plays an important role in our budgeting process.  Read more ...

Time tracking in agile projects is a controversially discussed topic in many project teams. Some people – typically the developers – argue that time tracking is at least unnecessary if not unwanted when following agile principles. They refer to documents like the Scrum Guide which says that “Scrum does not consider the time spent working on Sprint Backlog Items. The work remaining and date are the only variables of interest”. On the opposite side of the spectrum there are people – typically managers – who insist on detailed time tracking. They work according to the famous saying “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”. Agile is fresh, it is new. Therefore asking for time tracking might seem old-fashioned and somehow related to the often criticized waterfall model. However, there are a lot of valid reasons why you might still need time tracking even if you decide to work the agile way. Let’s take a look at six of the most important reasons.  Read more ...