Sabre Airline Solutions had many years of experience with its AirFlite Profit Manager, a big modeling and forecasting package that many airlines use to wring more income out of flight schedules. Even so, Release 8 of the software was four months late in 2000 after final system testing turned up 300 bugs. The first customer found 26 more bugs in the first three days of its acceptance testing, and subsequent joint testing by Sabre and the customer uncovered an additional 200 defects. www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/story/0,10801,91646,00.html

 "I can't do all that stuff you say I should do, but how do I handle the situation ..."
  The response:
  -- IT WON'T WORK HERE doesn't work here.

DataVision is an Open Source reporting tool similar to Crystal Reports. Reports can be designed using a drag-and-drop GUI. They may be run, viewed, and printed from the application or exported as HTML, XML, PDF, LaTeX2e, DocBook, or tab- or comma-delimited text files. The output files produced by LaTeX2e and DocBook can in turn be used to produce PDF, text, HTML, PostScript, and more.

DataVision is written in Java and uses JRuby to add Ruby scripting.

I think that to get a group to be agile, you have to get people to do something like one of these things:

1. Go in that room there and do all 12 XP practices until you actually do know better. (XP)
2. Go in that room there, don’t let anyone screw with you, work on whatever you think you can get done for a month. Keep doing that until everyone is happy. (Scrum)
3. Go in that room there, in peace love and understanding, ship software every month (*), and think about it. (Crystal Clear.)

There is a telling sameness to all of these, is there not? —> This is a wonderful summary of a summary! There’s not much to be removed (see Saint-Exupery, below). In Italian, the expresso of an espresso is called a "ristretto" (any Italians online?). This is the agile ristretto. It belongs on a Blog or something. "La perfection est atteinte non quand il ne reste rien a ajouter, mais quand il ne reste rien a enlever." (Saint-Exupery)

example graphs

 Will this company be successful and become another Google?
 First, graphical data mining has never been a big hit. And second,
 there are lots of competitors in the business intelligence sector,
 including at least Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion and MicroStrategy.
 So make your bets and wait for the next multibillion-dollar IPO.

I’ve been thinking about the problems of applying XP to whole organizations. Turns out this is ground thoroughly covered by the lean production folks.

Here is a paper I found helpful: www.nwlean.net/no_harm.zip The premise is that every step of the transformation must pay for itself.

Getting people to understand that their problems are tractable can be hard, I’ve found. Rob Mee was talking to a guy about TDD on a gig of ours recently. "Sure, yeah, TDD is a great idea." "Why don’t you do it?" "It’ll make us go slower." "But it makes you go faster." "Yes, of course, but it’ll make us go slower." "But it’ll make you go faster" *iterate N times for annoying large N* "Okay, it makes people go faster everywhere but here."

I always enjoy reading his weblog.