Free Burma!
Oct 4th, 2007
links for 2007-09-20
Sep 20th, 2007
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“Over the last few decades as source code became more complex, it became necessary to develop environments around the “code” so that coding itself was more easily addressed.”
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“The project overall is for fail. Mylyn comes with Eclipse and is not only the true open solution; its makes more sense.”
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Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. Trac uses a minimalistic approach to web-based software project management.
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“IBM Jazz “ain’t got that swing”. The good news is that by making the association with Jazz, IBM is pointing themselves and the broader market in the right direction.”
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“I wish the best for the Jazz.net team but I wish there was more, more space, more room for us than details.”
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“The question posed is: why, then, do we not replace large teams – no matter how well-run – with two and a half men coding away in garages?”
Agile and fixed price contracts
Sep 19th, 2007
Each time I attend a conference about agile software development, inevitably, the same question always appears: how to deal with fixed price contracts when working on agile methodologies. Usually, people did not get any satisfactory answers.
Scott Ambler, Practice Leader Agile Development within the IBM Methods group,
invariably gets the same question when working with clients or internal development teams. So he decided to take it one step further and address the question in the Dr. Dobb’s article “Agile on a Fixed Budget: Resources, schedule, and scope“:
The column first summarizes strategies for what you would do when each of these factors is allowed to vary so that you understand what trade-offs you’re making. Then it describes what I consider to be your best approach remaining to you for each combination of constraining the three factors. The main point of the article is that although it isn’t ideal to have one or more of these factors constrained, you can still take an Agile approach even when such constraints exist.
Scott approach is not the panacea, but it’s a worth read.
Another interesting read is the Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz post “Fixed Bids and Agile Projects”, which shares a few strategies he successfully used and provides two useful links: Agile Fixed Price Projects part 1: “The Price Is Right” and Agile Fixed Price Projects part 2: “Do you want agility with that?”.
And finally, here there are some other opinions I have recollected:
- Fixed Price Contracts and Agile Delivery: Richard suggests to apply agile’s iterative approach to the proposal.
- Successfully Applying Agile to Fixed-Bid Projects: the post suggests that the customer must understand that the fixed-bid is not in their interest if the scope is also fixed.
- Fixed bids, agile projects: Oren points out several options and give some tips on how to win such projects.
- Agile development in a FDA regulated setting: this post explains why agile methodologies have a long way to go before we see them commonly used in regulated environments, in this case, FDA.
- FixedPrice: Martin Fowler points out that you can’t come up with a fixed scope when working on fixed price contracts.
- Fixed-Price Agile Projects: Peter’s approach is to fix price each iteration before it starts.
Do you have any other successful strategy or experience?
links for 2007-09-17
Sep 17th, 2007
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K. Silz: “Yes, Project Zero and Jazz have some stupid, half-baked approaches. I hope that at least Jazz fails to a certain degree so that it gets donated to Eclipse, because it really sounds interesting.”
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“We might think about open-sourcing some of the very lowest layers (of the framework) so that the APIs (application programming interfaces) are available, and people could build on the kernel,” said Scott Rich,
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B. Higgins: “Basically we look for opportunities where deep integration with other Jazz components could produce a much more productive experience.”
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This book explores the business needs and the architectural choices that were faced by the customer. It describes the mock-ups and prototypes, provides performance numbers that were used to validate the decisions, and explains how they were implemented. I
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InstallationWiki.org is designed to provide you with comprehensive and free guides to installing software. It is an open Wiki for everyone to contribute to.
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Agile annotated Bibliography Wiki
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“Usually I’m allergic to vendor lock-in, but Jazz will make me throw my own principles over board.”
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CouchDB summary
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non-commercial, open forum to share ideas and interact with other people interested in domain-driven design.
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“People join open-source communities where the code is quality and they can make a meaningful impact. IBM knows this. It just needs to message it correctly.”
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“I would suggest Mozilla’s best bet is to go the Eclipse route.”
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Rather than focus on what to do after a problem happens, here are 12 things you can do to your environment now to make troubleshooting quicker and more effective when problems do occur.
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joining a new project? read this post before 😉
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Squeak is a modern open-source development environment for the classic Smalltalk-80 programming language.
links for 2007-09-08
Sep 8th, 2007
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The EPF’s PM talks about how the project uses the open source approach to let practitioners collaborate on building software methodologies and documenting Agile practices
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“Programming Erlang — Software For A Concurrent World” book review.
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DBMS: “the world of 2007 is radically different from the world of the late 1970s. However, none of the major vendors have performed a complete redesign to deal with this changed landscape.”
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I like DSL Tools, but this is a constraint: “Microsoft sees UML and its ilk as too hard and too heavy a process, and is working on delivering its own modeling technology.”
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Bobby’s new book: “Exploring IBM SOA Technology & Practice”. The e-book provides a concise and consistent overview of IBM’s approach to SOA–our methods, architectures, and products for being successful with SOA.
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“the general direction is to continue to evolve and enhance the DSL Tools to support richer modeling scenarios, and at the same time generalize our model-driven approach to creating designers for creating other kinds of tools and extensions to VS”
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software development: “we haven’t moved beyond the anecdote phase, and attempts to move beyond the anecdote phase are usually just anecdotes with statistics.”
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This IBM Redbooks publication provides an overview of the performance impact of DB2 9 for z/OS, especially performance scalability for transactions, CPU and elapsed time for queries and utilities
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“RESTbot implements a web server on top of LibSecondLife. LibSecondLife is a very nice .Net interface to Second Life.”
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Amen: “However when you need to make the model very specific so it would allow code generation – you get to a stage where it is more convenient to do it in code and rely on generated or pre-built DSL or framework”
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The DeveloperWorks article covers changes from Mylar (the previous release) to Mylyn, and addresses how to integrate Mylyn into your normal development cycle.
