KPI’s in an agile world can work well if appropriate KPI’s are measured and recorded. Unfortunately, when the PMO have an alteria agenda, KPI’s can lead to a prickle relationship between development team and PMO.

What’s interesting is that a PMO that tracks a KPI based on the delta of story estimate vs actual time spent, is either tracking how badly the development team have estimated, or how badly the story was written. Contentious?

Velocity is often mis-understood by management. Michael Dubakov warnings against the measurement of individual velocity or estimate accuracy on an agile project

Adobe move ahead of Microsoft in RIA search.

Here are a few meeting characters I’ve come across over the last few years:

• The blackberry typer - Not really interested in the meeting, there because they have to be, more interested in replying to their emails.
• The speed talker - If you can talk fast enough, nobody actually knows what you are saying, and hence you sound intelligent.
• The slow talker - Snail’s pace about getting a point across, when in reality a single sentence would have been sufficient a week ago.
• The avid notetaker - Burning through trees, they take an incredible number of notes, however its unclear what they actually do with the notes.
• The PowerPoint Guru - Doesn’t matter what the meeting is on, they’ll arrive with the coolest PowerPoint - which took hours to produce.
• The non-notetaker - Do they really remember everything?
• The sentence repeater - The individual who repeats the last sentence somebody else said, attempting to make themselves sound important.
• The late arriver - They always arrive late, believing they are more important than anyone else

Ming Xu on WFC Windows HPC V2: Video 1, 2, 3 and 4

A colleague recommended the Clipper today, allowing me to avoiding the usual hot sardine can tube commute. Mix the hot weather we’re current having in London with the Clippers onboard bar, and you possible end up with a very pleasant mode of commuting.

If you’ve got 15+ software engineers on a team, then its possibly time to turn to Scrum of Scum. Only outstanding question is how to split the team; feature set, line of business, etc?

9th July 2008 - Route map here.

A few funny ones here.

Flex 4 wish list for 2009

• Reflection to the level that Java/.NET offer
• Better support for dynamic modules
• Versioning

If you’ve worked for a financial institution, you’ll know it’s very different working for a desk (business) compared to the IT side of the business. A desk wants results immediately, they by-pass every software practice rule in the book purely for the goal of generating $ for company, and hence improving the desks staff yearly bonus. I’ve heard of trading systems being run off developers PC’s that are located under their desk - forget secure data centres.

IT attempts to tackle the business problem using “sensible” software practices. It tries to identify the problem, plans the solution, get budget signoff, implements the solution, and finally delivers the solution to the desk x months/years later. By which time the desk has changed strategy or decided IT was too slow and hence when off and bought/implemented their own solution.

In reality neither is correct, and what should actually happen is that both IT and the business (desk) should work closer together to solve the business problem in a cost efficient and timely manner. Unfortunately this rarely happens, since business (the desk) is paying for the development, and always wants everything yesterday. Confronting this challenging situation is hard. Attempting to deliver a business solution when you are sitting within arm’s length of the trading desk is possibly one of the hash software development environments in the world. The political battles, the demands from the desk, the ever pushing business demands are a heavy burden on anyone’s shoulders. If you can survive this world, and deliver a solution that the business uses, respects, and that generate real revenue increases you are definitely on a career accelerating project which will probably offer an amazing buzz when you see your application running on the trading floor.