FlexAbility

What Gartner Is Telling Your Boss, an article on the Microsoft DevSource site, should be of interest to both developers and managers.

Some hilites:

• “faster is good … but better is more important”
• “agile methods are an accepted part of enterprise software development”
• “task granularity should generally be 8 to 80 hours”
• “the future of application development is not about programmer productivity, but in assembling functionality from components”
• “assembling, buying, and extracting is an increasing part of what you need to do”
• “kill development projects early and often if your failure rate is high” … “you can improve productivity by 20% by killing projects when you should: which is early in the lifecycle”
• “a project that has had three baseline adjustments because of scope creep is already in trouble. Most projects do have scope creep — 1% per month is typical — but three or more adjustments due to changing requirements means that the project is already out of control”