One of the least talked about and least understood of the 12 Extreme Programming (XP) practices is Metaphor.  Even Martin Fowler (who was involved in the birth of XP) doesn’t quite understand it.

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I found an article by Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres entitle “Getting Started with XP”. In it they describe three different approaches to moving to an agile development model, with a focus on XP. It was a surprisingly pragmatic and reasonable discussion, which lacked the all or nothing attitude commonly associated with XP practitioners.

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Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) is a software development methodology that has some popularity, mainly in the UK. It is maintained by a consortium including companies like EDS and the Royal Bank of Scotland. As a result it is focused on the needs and desires of large corporations. These big corporations may not seem very agile, but DSDM bills itself as an agile methodology. They even have a FAQ discussing how they compare to and interoperate with SCRUM.

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I read an interesting article by Alistair Cockburn that delves into the exact link between using iterations and agile in software development. Unfortunately the article’s title “Are iterations hazardous to your project?” is a bit misleading. Cockburn is not trying to say that using iterations is a bad thing.

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Jeff Sutherland has mentioned that Scrum was developed in part based on Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) Theory. Unfortunately he does not give any detailed description about the specifics of how CAS was used to develop Scrum. I did some Google-ing and found a master’s thesis by Jonas Bengtsson of the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden that attempts to clarify this link.

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I recently discovered that VMWare has release version 2.0.0 of their free Server product. I have been using VMWare server for a while now and have really like it. So I decided to give 2.0.0 a try to see what dramatic changes were in store. Well, I was right there were some serious changes, but not necessarily for the better.

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I started off with a very different title, something along the lines of “Why did Scrum and XP beat Lean.” My goal was to compare and contrast Lean with Scrum and XP, and explain why you hear about people using Scrum and XP, but not as much about Lean. It turns out that my original premise was based on a common misconception about Lean.

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The other day one of the managers at work said something like “What do you think it would take to get CMMI Level 3? That would let us bid on some more contracts.” We ended up talking to someone who used to work in a CMMI level 3 shop, and his response was “Don’t do it!” He described never ending quagmires of bureaucratic busywork. We are a small shop with a strong aversion to unnecessary bureaucracy. We pride ourselves in being able to respond to customer requests quickly with high quality work, and a huge pile of documents would get in the way of doing this.

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The term Beta has been applied to a lot of things these days, even Sesame Street uses it, and Google seems to have taken the “Beta” to a whole new level. They probably have more products labeled Beta than not. For example we have Gmail, Chrome, Scholar, Docs, Alerts, and of course there is labs.

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I have been trying out Google Chrome, and used it to go to my Adsense account, by typing google.com/adsense into the address bar. I got this mildly humorous result. Firefox gives the same error, but I think the Chrome error message is a bit more clear. On the other hand, when I click “Proceed anyway” in Chrome it remembers that decision. In Firefox you have to be much more deliberate about storing/remembering the decision to accept that certificate.

Google Chrome protects me from Google Adsense

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