Personalization is often considered a tool for customizing Web sites, but it is important to understand that the techniques of personalization go far beyond Web sites. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that within a relatively brief period of time -- perhaps as little as a decade -- all human/computer interactions will be intensely personalized.

Personalization is often considered a tool for customizing Web sites, but it is important to understand that the techniques of personalization go far beyond Web sites. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that within a relatively brief period of time -- perhaps as little as a decade -- all human/computer interactions will be intensely personalized.

This is a report from the trenches. The "hooks" by which it is meant to convince are not the author's litany of industry credentials (you won't have heard of most of the companies I've worked for), lofty corporate status (I am a developer, technical lead, and occasional project manager), or impressive degrees (I'm an autodidact and have none to speak of).

Recently I chanced to meet a gentleman on a plane who audits the software used in medical and pharmaceutical instruments. During our long and interesting conversation, he cited several instances in which defects in software had resulted in deaths.

I'm an employee of Workshare Technology, and we've been doing Extreme Programming (XP) in our R&D department for about a year and a half now. It seemed like a natural thing to do -- we want to produce quality code, and XP presented itself as a way of improving the quality of the code we produced.

I've introduced Scrum 1 into a wide range of companies and development projects over the past eight years. When I was asked to write this article, I reflected on why some implementations have proven successful and others failed.

"Extreme" is a word that may naturally spring to your mind when you think of India. In this vast kaleidoscope of people and places, visitors and citizens are constantly exposed to the extremes of the human experience. Extreme is almost a way of life here. But is India's large and economically critical software industry ready to adopt the development practices of Extreme Programming (XP)?

Our team's experience with Extreme Programming (XP) began halfway through a three-year development effort. Nancy, the team's technical lead, had read about XP and met some practitioners at a conference. Ron had been admiring the team from afar and jumped at the chance to fill a spot that had been vacated by promotion.

Productivity benchmarking means comparing the productivity of your projects with the productivity of other similar projects. Productivity is an important measure of the performance of software projects in a portfolio. It is defined as the ratio of output to input. In software, this translates to the ratio of effort to develop a system over the size of the system.

Editor's note: This discussion has been adapted from Bennatan's texts Software Project Management: A Practitioner's Approach (McGraw-Hill, 1992) and On Time Within Budget: Software Project Management Practices and Techniques, now in its third edition (John Wiley & Sons, 2000).

A recent risk management conference reminded me of James Carville's admonition to the Clinton campaign in 1992 about it being the economy, stupid! The presentations focused on processes and methods as have other similar conferences and articles. This misses the point. The introduction of risk management to an organization is primarily a change in behavior.

A recent risk management conference reminded me of James Carville's admonition to the Clinton campaign in 1992 about it being the economy, stupid! The presentations focused on processes and methods as have other similar conferences and articles. This misses the point. The introduction of risk management to an organization is primarily a change in behavior.

Imagine that you were going to build an IT outsourcing process from the ground up -- that is, you didn't have to deal with existing constraints or "the way we've always done it around here." How would you do it? What capabilities would be critical to maintain a high degree of outsourcing success and ongoing business customer satisfaction?

Imagine that you were going to build an IT outsourcing process from the ground up -- that is, you didn't have to deal with existing constraints or "the way we've always done it around here." How would you do it? What capabilities would be critical to maintain a high degree of outsourcing success and ongoing business customer satisfaction?

As outsourcing has evolved over the past 10 years, many new trends have developed. Client companies have become more adept at maximizing the value received through outsourcing using a number of methods.

As outsourcing has evolved over the past 10 years, many new trends have developed. Client companies have become more adept at maximizing the value received through outsourcing using a number of methods.