This article is summarized from the forthcoming book, Agile Modeling, to be published in late 2001 by John Wiley & Sons.

The Standish Group's Chaos reports (the 1994 original study and the recent 2001 update) have caused a tremendous waste of IT dollars. Just look at tool site after tool site -- project management, collaboration, software development, modeling tools -- the numbers from the Chaos report are given as a key reason for buying particular products.

As I write, the opening moments of the recent tragic events in New York City and Washington, DC, are barely a day past. The ruins of the twin towers are still smoking. I'm still processing it all, as are many others.

This Advisor examines several key mechanisms and abstractions, which can facilitate the overall architectural reengineering of legacy code.

Legacy applications share some common characteristics:

According to Cutter Consortium, business-IT alignment is better than ever!

The story of the shoemaker's children having no shoes of their own continues to be analogous to IT organizations that do not leverage software tools to accelerate and enhance the quality of their work. Automating IT is the next step in the evolutionary growth of a field that has automated virtually every other field.

The rise of agile methodologies has brought a lot of dispute and confusion into the IT community.

A new report from the research firm of Computer Economics indicates that the worldwide cost of computer viruses during the first eight months of this year is US $10.7 billion. Roughly $2.6 billion of this figure is associated with the Code Red computer worm, which many security experts still believe originated from China.

Despite what slick brochures and vendor representatives will tell you, not all tests can be automated.

"Collaboration without process is chaos, and process without automation is unrealistic," says Sky Basu, founder and CEO of speeDEV (http://www.speedev.com), a small (the company was formed in 1994, but released the first product, speeDEV, in 2000) company that has entered the collaborative software tool market.