Continual Improvement

• Mike Lunt: Advanced Agile – maybe not
  Having a hard time convincing others that Agile is the way to develop software? Give this brief post a gander.
  (tags: agile advanced starting process)

As most of you know, I’m a diehard Netflix fan. Besides a really simple and cheap method for watching movies, some of the really addictive aspects of Netflix include the ratings and friends features where you can rate movies and see what your friends thought. I really enjoy the “most similarity” rating, which shows which friends have the most similar taste in movies. While the rating could become self-prophesying, it definitely provides a good means for deciding what to watch in some situations.

Over the past couple of months a couple of friends have mentioned the new service that Blockbuster is providing, which is effectively trying to put Netflix on the dead company list. In addition, I’ve noticed that the Netflix turnaround on movies over the past 6 months has fallen off significantly. Since there is a shipping hub in Austin, I would typically get 2 day turnaround on a returned movie, but now, this time has increased to 4-5 days, which has left me dry on more than one occasion. Is this competition with Blockbuster starting to have an effect on Netflix? Has anyone else noticed the Netflix slowdown? I would think Netflix would want to do all it can to fend off its market share from Blockbuster; thus, saving a few dollars by slowing the movie return process seems like a bad trade off.

On a completely different note, why hasn’t Netflix integrated with Rotten Tomatoes? Before investing 2 hours of your life on a movie, it pays to do a little research, and Rotten Tomatoes includes excellent overall ratings from a large number of critics as well as users. Netflix has some critics involved with the online system, but having the power of aggregation of all critics would be a much added bonus.

• What is the goal of school?
  It’s hard to disagree, even though this wasn’t the original reason public schools were created.
  (tags: schools learning)

• Scrum and XP from the Trenches
  See the PDF in the opening sentence. Personally, I like 2 week iterations over 3 week. Also, while the backlog is VERY important, I see equal, if not more, benefit from the “keep releasable” iterations.
  (tags: scrum agile software ProjectManagement programming)

The technology trade rags are filled with all the latest new products allowing virtual machines (VM) to run on varieties of platforms and chipsets. For many of us, this means running many versions of Windows or Linux on one machine simultaneously; however, it could be just about any OS supported by the VM software of your choosing. While the obvious solutions this could fill would be centralized management of the workstations within a company, there are some more subtle ideas that appear to be taking hold. (Duh disclaimer: It’s possible that I’ve ignored these ideas in the past, but as my confidence slowly grows with VMs in the test lab, these ideas don’t seem as farfetched as before.)

Instead of shipping software to customers for installation, imagine shipping a VM with the software already installed on the OS. If the customer was running compatible VM server software, they could just load an instance of the new OS with software already installed, configured and ready to go. In fact, as this article eludes, the customer could ship a production copy back to the software company for maintenance and/or an upgrade, which could be tested before being shipped back to the customer.

Granted, there are some hurdles to overcome just as the introduction of multi-threading and multiple CPUs had issues, which means the hardware to support all of this will have to be faster and more robust than ever. Hard disk I/O and resource utilization will be an issue for the foreseeable future, but the more time intensive problems of debugging environmental software problems could be minimized. In some cases, the changes to a customer’s environment might be as easy as updating to a patched VM.

While those of us in the enterprise software industry know that the customer’s actual environment is more often a contributor of a problem than the software itself, the approach does provide some advantages in supportability. Does anyone know of software vendors using this approach yet? I wonder how many years away we are from seeing software vendors only support certain VM server software, which would be just the opposite for most vendors today? Are VM standards being set, or will we see the same compatibility problems that occurred with J2EE?

• Which open source CI tool is best suited for your application’s environment? - Java World
  A comparative review of four open source continuous integration tools
  (tags: java build software continuous CI development testing)
• Web Test Tools
  Web Site Test Tools and Site Management Tools
  (tags: automation web development test Software Testing tools quality qa)

• Mike Lunt - Corporate Cadence — TalkBMC
  I recently wrote a blog post on getting all the products in a company in sync. This follows the Agile spirit but requires some extra effort throughout the company.
  (tags: process agile cadence software)

• You ain’t gonna learn what you don’t want to know
  Why innovation is lacking in large companies…
  (tags: via:bwhichard management startup seth innovation)

• Mike Lunt - Bottlenecks are figments of imagination — TalkBMC
  Prompting teams to approach resource contraints in new ways.
  (tags: agile process software management)
• Conway’s Law
  “Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.”
  (tags: software process management programming organization)

• Inc.com | The Green 50
  50 companies making a profit using sustainable methods.
  (tags: green via:enterRETAINment environment inc.com)