Managing development you cannot read
How to check progress, read an estimate, judge quality and ask the right questions when you run the business and cannot read the code.
Guides in this topic
How to Restart a Software Project That Stalled
What exists, what it would cost to finish, who owns it, and whether the scope or the team caused the stall.
Who Supports Your Software Over the Holidays?
Your service runs through the end of December even when your supplier is closed. Here is the arrangement to agree first.
Taking Over a Codebase From a Team You No Longer Trust
The order matters more than the checklist. What to secure before you give notice, what to request during the handover, and what is unrecoverable once it is gone.
What a Non-Technical Owner Should Own, and What to Delegate
Most non-technical owners either over-delegate or over-reach. The line is not about seniority, it is about which decisions carry business consequences.
Signs Your Development Team Is Managing You
An honest slow team and a team managing you file identical reports. These are the six patterns that tell them apart, and what to do about each one.
How to Check Software Quality When You Cannot Read Code
Quality leaves traces outside the code: in the deploy record, the bug list, the onboarding time for a new developer. Here is how to read those traces.
Why Your Developer's Estimate Keeps Moving
Estimates move for five common reasons. Three of them are legitimate and two are not, and the difference is visible in how the reason is described.
What a Technical Audit Is, and When to Commission One
A technical audit is a read of the system by someone with no stake in how it was built. What it covers, when it is worth commissioning, and what to do with it.
What to Ask Your Development Team Every Week
A practical weekly agenda for a non-technical owner: the four questions that cannot be answered with a confident paragraph, and what a real answer sounds like.
"It's 90% Done" and What That Actually Means
Why "nearly finished" is the most expensive sentence on a software project, what is usually left when it is said, and how to check it without technical knowledge.
How to Tell If a Software Project Is Really Behind
The difference between a project that is hard and a project that has stopped, and the four signals that separate them without anyone having to read code.
How to Read a Sprint Report Without Being Technical
What each part of a sprint report is measuring, which parts can be gamed, and the three things worth looking at if you only have five minutes.
How we would work on this
Technical judgement on your side of the table
An independent review of the work your developers produce, reported in plain language.
You run the business. We build the product in full.
The complete product, built and operated by us, for a company with no technical team of its own.
Building the product for what comes next
We would rather deliver one product that holds up than three that have to be rebuilt. That standard is the same on every project, whatever its size.
Ali Boran GazelCEO