Links for February 23rd through February 24th

A little something extra…

I reviewed a nice looking manuscript for Israel Gat a few weeks ago, a short guide for executives looking to apply Agile in their organization. In the review notes, I hit up a theme I like to bring up frequently about Agile development:

Agile process is, actually, a highly disciplined governance process. Things like Scrum and even XP are highly regimented processes and even in half-ass implementations are actually much more effective processes than other software governance models. Agile realizes (whether knowing it or not) that programmers will always try to hack and work around The System and so it lets coders do their daily work however they want.

Instead, Agile focuses on results which enforce making sure the coders actually do something and learn how to make promises they can keep. This contrasts with more traditional software development processes that are more focused on enforcing a process with the belief that following the process will result in shippable code.

Agile care about process, but it cares more about continuously tuning process to, ongoing, work best for the team. To Agile, “process” is a tool. In some respect, the traditional idea of “governance” (enforcing process, code, methods, etc.) is anti-Agile, but the better idea of “governance” (making sure your workers are benefiting the company) is purely Agile.

…Agile talk is coming up a lot for me recently. I think it’s primarily driven by developers trying to connect their process to cloud-driven/inspired methodologies. Once operations stops being a bottle-neck (deployment, mostly, and “change management”), Agile developers have to figure out what they’d do if they actually released each iteration to customers. Fun times!

The Links

• Citrix buys Paglo to boost asset management
• CA Continues Shopping Spree; Acquires 3Tera To Boost Presence In The Cloud
• UT's Venture Labs gets ready to launch
• Austin, Texas: Live Music And Now LiveOak [Voices]
• VMware is doing a great job of equating success in virtual servers to success in virtual desktops – Brian Madden – BrianMadden.com
• Adobe AIR 2.0, full-featured Flash Player coming to smartphones | Developer World – InfoWorld
  Adobe RIA finishing up it's new mobile support.
• Microsoft, Amazon strike patent licensing deal | Intellectual property – InfoWorld
  Kindle safe from being sued by Microsoft for patents, both get cross-licensing to each other.
• IBM announces massive NAS array for the cloud
  "IBM announced an enterprise-class network attached storage (NAS) array today that is capable of scaling to 14 petabytes under a single name space."
• Amazon EC2 Boosts Memory, Windows Support
  Amazon does some in-memory moves.
• Dell to buy California software company
• Incentive proposal for LegalZoom advances
  "Under the proposal, the city would pay LegalZoom $20,000 a year for 10 years, tied to meeting job creation targets that start at 50 jobs this year and rise to 600 after five years. The Texas Enterprise Fund would kick in $1 million if the city incentives win City Council approval."
• Windows Phone 7 Series launched • Register Hardware
  Doesn't look too shabby, actually.
• Microsoft re-tiles mobile platform for Windows 7 era
• IBM consumes network kit automation firm • The Register
  "Intelliden specializes in software that allows telecoms to automate the configuration of thousands of routers, switches, and hubs made by a range of different vendors."
• Open source – the once and future dream
  Big wrap-up piece on open source in the last 10 years and what it needs now: users (corp. folks) to start contributing.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.