Love this from Gartner. "Gartner Estimates Global 'IT Debt' to Be $500 Billion This Year, with Potential to Grow to $1 Trillion by 2015".

NetworkWorld ran a quicky version of the story. Gartner: Global 'IT debt' hits $500 billion, on the way to $1 trillion.

ComputerWorld -- to be proper journalists …

There's a Special Report in the January 15 SDTimes with a headline that bothers me -- a lot. In the print edition, it's called "Can ALM tame the agile beast?". Online it's ALM Tools Evolve in the Face of Agile Processes.

The online title makes a lot more sense than the …

Eight Things Business Hates About IT. Plus eight things IT hates about business.

I suppose.

While there are 8 things identified, they seem to boil down to 2 things to fix: Replace bureaucratic with Agile; replace Keep The Lights On Management with any other way of budgeting.

While Agility is …

After all, programmers are all lazy and stupid.

Got his complaint recently.

"Developers on a fairly routine basis check in code into the wrong branch."

Followed by a common form of the lazy and stupid complaint. "Someone should think about which branch is used for what and when." Clearly "someone …

I had a recent conversation with some folks who were desperate to "processize" everything. They were asking about Scrum Master certification and what standards organizations define the "official" Scrum method.

Interestingly, I also saw a cool column in Better Software magazine, called "Scrumdamentalism" on the same basic question.

In my …

Many folks ask about Agile project planning and total cost. As our internal project managers wrestle with this, there are a lot of questions.

Mostly these questions are rejections of incremental delivery ("All or Nothing") or rejections of flexibility ("Total Total Cost"). We'll look at these rejections in detail.

Traditional …

Got this question recently.

"Any suggestions on PM tools that meet the following considerations

1. Planning
2. Estimating
3. Tracking (allowing both PM input and developer input)
4. Reporting
5. Support both Agile and Waterfall projects
6. Releases
7. Bug fixes (probably just another type of backlog)"

Agile PM requires far less planning than you're used to …

I found this note while cleaning up. I think it's a summary of John Cleese's short movie "Meetings Bloody Meetings".

1. Plan. Why are we meeting? What's the purpose? What are the subjects?
2. Inform. Tell the attendees what, why and the expected outcome.
3. Prepare. Create an agenda, with a time line …

Some assumptions are really hard to identify as "assumptions". Some assumptions are more "wishful thinking" than "assumption".

We process a lot of spreadsheets. As far as I'm concerned, the Spreadsheet User Interface (SUI) is a first-class part of any application. Users understand them, and you don't have to code as …

Two months ago, we looked at some Data Warehouse design information.

It looked like 8 months of work. It might be finished by year-end. Fatal mistake: we gave a "number". Year-end.

We did due diligence, investigating source applications, data marts, subject areas, etc. And, the client delayed their decision-making process …