Time Cockpit Blog

In time cockpit version August 2016 we extended the existing project management functionalities. Up to now, time cockpit provided a list for budgetary control of projects. This list helps you to check whether the actual effort is within the project budget. In larger projects you will need more control over the status of you project, so we added a new list "Budgetary Control of Tasks", that allows you to monitor the progress of your projects on task level.  Read more ...

It has been 6 and a half years now since we have gone live with time cockpit back in 2010. In these years, we have served various company types. In this article we want to share our experience when introducing time cockpit.  Read more ...

Although software is intangible, it ages. As a consequence, every software company will at some point need to make significant investments to redesign and modernize existing applications. In such projects, costs and available resources are important for design decisions. Without a design-to-cost approach, redesign projects often are stopped before they are finished. Frankenstein software is the result. Read more about how to use the design-to-cost approach to protect against Frankenstein.  Read more ...

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 ...

A few months ago I wrote a blog article about the concept of "Shearing Layers" in architecture and software development. I submitted a longer, German version of the article for OBJEKTspektrum, a well-known German magazine about IT management and software engineering. It was accepted and is included in this month's issue. For a limited amount of time it is also available online.  Read more ...

Technical optimization projects are part of our daily business in software development. Additionally, with time cockpit, we are often involved in projects for optimizing team performance and productivity. In this blog article I would like to summarize my learnings about what differentiates successful optimization projects from failures.  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 ...

We did Scrum years ago for the initial development of time cockpit. Granted, there were times where we managed to do Scrum nearly by the book but sometimes we got a bit lazy. Nevertheless, it worked perfectly fine for us. Today, we don’t do Scrum anymore. In this blog article I want to describe why we turned away from it and how we manage our development process today.  Read more ...

Haven't we all learned in project management courses that fixed-price contracts are not necessarily an advantage for the buyer-side? Weren't these problems the very reason why agile project management principles have been invented? However, it is a matter of fact that many customers still insist on fixed project prices. In this blog article I want to share our approach of making fixed-price and agile go together.  Read more ...