PLM Basics

Taken from: http://www.impacsystems.com/blogengine/post/PLM-Basics.aspx

When talking to companies about PLM, I end up doing a lot of educating.  I am constantly looking for ways to simplify the explanation.  My current thinking is that I can put the over 100 features in two buckets:  Control and Visibility.  What follows is overly abbreviated…

Effective Java Profiling With Open Source Tools

Taken from: http://www.infoq.com/articles/java-profiling-with-open-source

In this article I will be going through some of the open source tools that are available. Some of these tools come with the JVM itself, while some are third party tools. I will start out with the simplest of the tools, and gradually move on to more sophisticated tools as the article progresses. The main objective is to enable you to extend your diagnostic toolbox, something that will most definitely come in handy when you application starts to perform strange, slow or not at all.

JavaScript Unit Testing

Taken from: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/os-jstesting/index.html?ca=drs-

Summary:  JavaScript code that runs on one browser does not necessarily mean it will work on others. Without unit testing this code, organizations pay money for testing and re-testing web applications when deciding to upgrade or support new browsers. In this article, learn how efficient unit testing of your JavaScript can reduce testing costs and make it easier for you to support more browsers.

Want to go mobile? Consider the following 8 questions

It's not that different from web development but mobile is still different enough to justify taking the time to step back and think about the following questions

Against Value Stream Mapping

Have a look at this post . Having studied hermeneutics in a past life, I thought this post quite interesting. Please, read it keeping in mind this approach as a contrast.

H.

.Net week-end reads

Handling Large Data Sets in Silverlight using WCF and Customized DataGrids

Introducing .NET 4.0 Parallel Programming

Simplified MVVM: Silverlight Video Player

AsyncWorker - a typesafe BackgroundWorker (and about Threading in general)

Active Directory Helper

Total Business Value

Dean Leffingwell has a great post on Prioritizing Features in  Scaling Software Agility. He argues that, since value delivering is a key economic driver, basing prioritization on Cost of Delay, thought not all that different from prior models, might be a very efficient way of working the backlog.

The article is very well researched and makes a compelling argument. So much so that I will make some proof of concept using the suggested method. We work wih stories and so far, we have "enhanced'' the business value of our stories by adding Hidden Business Values and R&D values. That way, we don't expect our PO to prioritized the stories with a heavy "back end" value (we call "hidden such as logging, parallelizing, etc) or corporate concerns (in our case, R&D because we have strong R&D programs in Quebec). By adding the Bv, HBv and R&Dv, we end up with a Total Business Value, which we use with the estimated Effort Value (Ev) for prioritizing stories.

I wanted to use a metric regarding risks. It seems to me that monitoring Cost of Delay metrics would also be a very efficient addition to the way we currently do things.

Hubert