The 1 April issue of BusinessWeek magazine has an excellent article that provides a review of what actually happened during the last decade ("Restating the '90s" by Michael J. Mandel, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_13/b3776001.htm).

In a previous Cutter IT E-Mail Advisor ( Head, Heart, or Hands: Understanding Your Role), I discussed the need to fully understand your role at work, whether you work internally for an IS group, or whether you work as a consultant.

I spent a recent airplane flight between Chicago and San Francisco reading a new survey of workflow systems. The book was the Workflow Handbook 2002 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0970350902/cutterinformatco).

One of Agile Modeling's (AM) supplementary practices is Apply Modeling Standards, the modeling version of Extreme Programming's (XP) Coding Standards practice. The basic idea is that developers should agree to and follow a common set of modeling standards on a software project. Clean code that follows your chosen coding guidelines is easier to understand and evolve than code that doesn't.

The team members were reviewing the current project progress. Things were in pretty good shape, except that the project was currently going through a turbulent zone. The usual priority changes and resource allocation clashes were taking place.

In the September and November issues of IEEE Computing magazine, Alistair Cockburn and I wrote two articles on agile software development -- "The Business of Innovation" and "The People Factor." Then, in the January 2002 issue, Barry Boehm wrote a very thoughtful article about where agile methods fit within the spectrum of approaches to software development and project management ("Get Ready for

No one who works in computing can be unaware of the meaningless and constant jargon that we are all forced to listen to. I'd be interested to see a graduate school study of the amount of time IT managers spend just trying to understand the new terms they keep encountering. It's frustrating, of course, because in most cases the new terms just turn out to be some old term, given a slight twist.

As spring is starting to spring around the country and even before the first robin has arrived, spring training has started for professional baseball. So how about a baseball analogy for software development?