One of the most interesting sessions at this year's Cutter Summit conference was the one on XP. If you haven't been keeping up with your buzzwords lately, XP is the abbreviation for extreme programming; one of the leading spokesmen on the topic, Kent Beck, gave the keynote address, and a spirited debate took place during the panel session that followed.

Over the past few months, there has been a lot of debate and discussion amongst Cutter Consortium Senior Consultants about the merits of various IT tools, technologies, and techniques. Light versus heavy methods, pair programming versus traditional individual programming, agile versus strict modeling, philosophers versus practitioners, and so on.

I'm sure most of you reacted as I did when you heard that two Microsoft vice presidents had launched an attack on open source software: What else is new? In effect, Microsoft has been doing this for a long time, and it's hardly news. Other companies like IBM and Sun, which have promoted proprietary software in the past, have come around and figured out how to live with open source software.

We hear a lot about hackers getting into corporate computers and the impact of viruses on worker productivity. What we don't hear about is the impact of poor security policies on worker productivity. I consult a lot with organizations around the world, and I am seeing an interesting trend with corporate security: as corporate managers become more afraid, enterprise security becomes more intrusive.

With the dot-com shakeout and the general malaise infecting the economy, you'd almost think that business intelligence (BI) analytics for business-to-consumer (B2C) personalization had become a dirty term. Last year at this time, vendors were tripping over themselves to enter the B2C analytics and "personalization" market.

By now, there's hardly a soul anywhere in the world who hasn't heard about the dot-com collapse and the resultant layoff of dot-com whiz kids. But the ripple-effect consequences of that phenomenon are getting more and more complex, and I'm beginning to think that we may be dealing with the aftereffects for months, if not years, to come.

I've had several conversations lately that worry me. The conversations were about the meaning of the dot-com mess and the slump of tech market stocks. Typically, they contain some amount of "I told you so" sentiment.

Every week, I read stories of another offshore software company assessed at the highest levels of process maturity based on the Capability Maturity Model (Software CMM) of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). The photo that usually accompanies this story often shows youthful software developers standing with huge grins on their faces as though they have just won the lottery.

Unless you've been stuck aboard the International Space Station for the past few days, you've probably heard that IBM is buying Informix Software's database business for a cool US $1 billion in cash. Lots of people have commented as to what this deal means in general for the database market, but what does it portend for IBM's data warehousing and BI business, as well as for the BI market in general?

Building survivable systems out of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components is a daunting task, primarily because you have little or no access to the artifacts of the software engineering process used to create the components. One way to partially compensate is to use vendor risk assessments as a tool to help you build, maintain, and evolve survivable COTS-based systems.

Wireless business intelligence (BI) is about delivering data access and analysis to users of cell phones and other Web-enabled devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), which are beginning to proliferate among business professionals and other mobile workers.