The goal of software metrics is to have a rich collection of data and an easy way of mining the data to establish the metrics for those measures deemed important to process, team, and product improvement. When you measure something and publish the measurement regularly, improvement happens. This is because a focus is brought on the public results.

Delivering More Business Value Where Needed

Within the software development community, one of the biggest movements over the past decade has been Agile Development whereby teams adopt practices and attitudes consistent with the now famous Agile Manifesto. Additionally, there has been much discussion over the past four to five years about applying principles from the Theory of Constraints (ToC) and Lean Product Development (Lean) to software development. This has had a tendency to muddy the surrounding waters as teams question whether they  should apply Agile, ToC, or Lean concepts. Are these three approaches mutually exclusive? Is there some hidden magic that can be unlocked by careful application of all three? Isn't it hard enough just trying to be Agile, without also trying to be Lean and ToC-ish? In this article we give an overview of Lean and ToC and show how they can be used in conjunction with Agile practices to focus on an organization's business value. By using elements of Lean, ToC, and Agile together more business value can be delivered with less effort.

In service oriented architectures (SOA), there are three essential components for delivery: published service; long-lived business processes; and short-lived business processes. Baselines are key to successful SOA delivery. They identify the service—and the components making up the service—being delivery to an environment and provide for co-existence of multiple services in the environments at the same time.

This month we would like to turn the spotlight on to that oft neglected and under-valued specimen the build engineer. In the physical world, the term “building” has traditionally inspired status and respect. We just have to think of structures from the pyramids to medieval cathedrals to skyscrapers.