The Future As Seen By Me In 2010

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Well looky here, things one has scanned in eh. (ignore the photo, that's some guy that made some accounting software, not sure what became of him ;) MIKE RIVERSDALE is fuming. The expensive headphones he bought in Sydney three weeks ago have just died. His first reaction is not to randomly spill expletives into his coffee, but to use his iPhone to vent his frustration to his Twitter con- tacts, under the moniker Miramar Mike. "I will also put, 'What should I do?' It's a conversation. I'm reaching out to the people following me." The council predicts hand-held digital devices such as smartphones will rule the world in 2040. They already rule the life of Mr Riversdale, whose company WaveAdept helps businesses adapt - their computing sys- tems to allow staff to work from anywhere - and with anyone. In order of fre- equency, he uses his iPhone to tweet (1136 followers; 8363 tweets since joining), e-mail, make phone calls and use online services, such as checki
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Computerworld Talks About "2.0" When It Should Be Talking About Agile

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Computerworld has a fairly bog standard article entitled, Five Web 2.0 development lessons for enterprise IT ("Corporate IT departments would benefit from adopting the methodology, some say"), that espouses a "2.0" spirit which totally misses the point.

Web 2.0 does indeed live in a "constant beta" mode as the Computerworld article opens:
Yahoo's Flickr unit reported recently that the latest update to the photo sharing website went live just before 5pm with nine changes made by three of its developers. The "deployment" was the 36th new release in a week where 627 changes were made by 21 developers.

Such constant tweaking — called a perpetual beta in the Web 2.0 world — is common for companies like Flickr, which build applications for a consumer market that's always in flux.

However this isn't because they are "Web 2.0", it's because they are agile companies.

In a nutshell:
  • some "2.0"companies use agile development techniques
  • some corporate IT Departments use agile development techniques
  • being "2.0" does not mean you are agile
  • using agile dev techniques does not mean you have to be a "2.0" shop
Using an agile development technique (such as Scrum) will help any team address the five points that Computerworld highlight as "must do's" for IT Departments:
  1. Break the barrier between developers and end users, and involve users in quality assurance processes.
  2. Keep it simple
  3. Stick to the script
  4. Release early and often
  5. Let users, not developers, determine new features
Very good.

If you want to know more about Agile Development I suggest you:

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