When web2project was first formed in November 2007, I was recruited to work on the community side of things. I had previously earned a spot on the dotProject team by performing support in the forums, blogging, writing the occasional documentation, collecting user feedback, and tracking bug reports, so it was familiar ground.

As of Sunday, January 9th, the first version of the Risk Management Module is available for Web2project. While I'd love to be able to describe all the changes, the conversion process covered so many aspects, it's hard to list them all. The most important ones are:

In case you haven't been following along, I tend to talk quite a bit about web2project and its upcoming release.  At this point, the release is so close that a number of questions have popped up:

What features does it have?  What features doesn't it have?  Where are these features found, defined, and refined?  How do you determine any of those?  What is the process?  How do we get there from here?

These are all variations and nuances of:

What does the next version look like?

A few months ago, I heard an interesting idea about the 2nd Worst Developer.  It's wrapped up in a simple statement:

... the quality of a software system is proportional to the skills of the second worst programmer

While at first pass, that may seem to be a silly statement, but here's why:

... everyone on the team knows who the worst programmer is, so senior developers are closely monitoring everything that he does and cleaning up problems. The work of the second worst programmer is not monitored with that attention so he has the chance to do some real damage.

On small teams with short projects and even shorter deadlines, this problem is multiplied.  Not only are you dealing with overlooked problems, but you're dealing with less-than-perfect decisions consciously made to "get it launched".  Now you have two problems that compound on each other... Brandon Savage covers this one well in "Paying Down Technical Debt".

Any and all discussion and information in this post should be taken as professional commentary and analysis for a US-based audience, not legal advice.  Nothing on this site should be taken as legal advice.  When in doubt, talk to an attorney.  When not in doubt, talk to an attorney.  Either way, do some research first and have intelligent questions for them.  It will save you time, money, and stress.

Every so often in my professional life, I get a Non-compete Agreement across my desk.  The vast majority of them are along the lines of "you can't solicit our customers, we can't solicit yours for N months/years".  A few are along the lines of "any inside information learned from us cannot be used for anything other than what we authorize".

I find both of these to be reasonable and normally sign them with little - if any - hesitancy.

It's been over three years since the last release of the RIsk Management Module, but due to popular demand, it is back.

This announces v3.0 of the Risk Management Module: available here.

Many people don't understand what Risk Management is, but oddly enough, Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield summed it up nicely:

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."