IT project methodologies

Question

Looking for good project methodologies.Anyone got some good reference links..want to share.

Answer 1

There are SO many project methodologies that you could spend ages searching and still not finding what you are looking for.

To start with, it's important to have a good understanding of the type of project you deal with. Different metholodogies will suit different types of projects. A large scale project with complex business rules and 50 developers needs a different approach to the implementation of an open source ecommerce system for a local computer supplies store. In short, the larger the project, the more formal the methodology.

In terms of the agile movement, the key methodologies are as follows

• Scrum
• XP
• FDD
• DSDM

I believe there's also an agile version of RUP. My preference is for FDD (Feature Driven Development) and I've written an article about why I chose FDD after searching for a silver bullet to my problems with projects going astray. I didn't find the elusive silver bullet but with FDD, I did find a handful of very useful practices that I still use today for web development projects.

http://www.martinbauer.com/articles/successful_web_development_methodologies

Cheers, Marty

Answer 2

Here's a Wikipedia article on the Rational Unified Process. You can also find information on the Capability Maturity Model at www.sei.cmu.edu/cmm

Answer 3

This is a link from google video of Ken Schwaber co-developer of the Agile process, Scrum called as Scrum et al. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7230144396191025011. I gives a nice briefing about what scrum is all about and how it can be used from project management.

Another link from InfoQ about Agile and how Thoughtworks has come out with a solution for it. http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/11/agile-infrastructure-made-easy

Answer 4

www.agilealliance.org should be helpful in finding info on things like XP and Scrum.