Microsoft VSTS Process Templates homepage features Cognizant Feature Driven Development process template. Cognizant adds many (too many, actually) new concepts to FDD so that the process looses its elegant simplicity and focus. Instead of focusing on bug-free feature implementations with low deviation in development time they introduce a concept of "bug". Simple and powerful process indicators dominated by sophisticated work items state transitions. If there is a choice, I'd use "original" FDD even without tool support.

More information on "original" Feature Driven Development:

Feature Driven Development portal
Agile Software Development using FDD
FDD Overview Presentation

This is actually a repeat of my older post from my old blog. But it is summer again, so why not?

Here in Ukraine you can more and more often hear people asking "How were they grown?" when they buy some vegetables. Especially when they are going to buy early vegetables that are difficult if at all possible cultivate by "usual" process and get harvest this early. What this essentially means is that people are interested in the process used to achieve the result. Why they would want to know that? Because this helps customers evaluate quality of the product. It helps customers understand internal characteristics of the product they are about to buy. And here not only the process or quality assurance procedures itself matter but also the ability to effectively communicate benefits of the process to win customers' trust is important.

The same thing happens with software development. We want to build trust relationships with our customers. But this means that we have to give them a look at what is going inside, we have to provide transparency for the customers. It is extremely difficult and sometimes very inefficient to build trust without transparency. So think twice before replying to customer's "How are you going to achieve this result?" with "Just trust us. We will do it."

More on this topic in David Anderson's post "No Trust without Transparency".

Every once in while in my day-to-day life I observe situations which make me think and draw analogies with my professional activities. Also I found that when I try to explain some concept to somebody I often use different analogies to make my speech more understandable and memorable. So I decided to start a series of posts called Projections of life where I will document my observations and thoughts. I hope they will be interesting and useful to you. So check out my Projections of life.

How do you define “dead technology”? My definition is that dead technology is no longer used to build new systems. Old legacy systems may be still running, may be still maintained, but no new development takes place. ComputerWorld proposes top 10 list of dead technologies.

It is amusing how some technologies gained to much momentum that we are speaking of them half-a-century after they were first introduced.

Just came across this series of podcasts published by BBC World Service – The Handy Guide to the Gurus of Management. Going to listen to them in the nearest future.

Business is about making a difference. Difference to customers, difference to partners, difference to employees. Now how you are different and why it is good or bad and act appropriately. Check out this material about difference (via Joel).

Microsoft disproves rumors about its moves to acquire Yahoo!. Microsoft executive says they’ve got everything they need to be successful advertising business. While I’m ok with Microsoft side, there is something that concerns me on Yahoo! side. Unfortunately, I’m not that much familiar Yahoo! and their services, but I do not think Yahoo!’s only value is its position in online advertising.

Evaluation period of my copy of BlogJet approaches its end. While I like the tool in general I’m still not sure if I want to spend another $40 on it. I got used to BlogJet as it has all of the features you need for effective blogging, but there are issues that really irritate me:

• I did not manage to get it to work through authentication-protected proxy.
• I did not manage to get image upload to work properly. Somehow it tries to recreate the folder where I want to upload images and naturally fails.
• It does not work with tags on Blogger.

Still have 3 days to think.

I’ve come across a picture of Al Gore in his office. This immediately reminded me a story about Bill Gates – he also uses 3 monitors.

How many monitors do you have on your desktop?

While listening to Department of Defensiveness podcast by Jim and Michele McCarthy I’ve heard about GeekLeaders.com. Among other things you can find transcripts of some Jim’s podcasts. One of the most recent transcripts has very eye-catching title:

billg: Where did you get this date? jimmc: Out of my ass?

In general the most interesting part of this site to me at this moment is Geek Leader Competencies. Good reading for week-end.