One and one-half million lines of code -- and that's just the beginning.

A number of organizations with high software capability are finding it possible to increase their capability even further by successfully exploiting the concept of software product lines. A software product line is a group of software products that, in relation to their given market or mission and their implementation, have a set of common features and well-understood variations.

The term "server" has become a seriously overused word. There are hardware platforms called servers and there are operating systems called servers (e.g., Windows 2000 Server). At the same time that Microsoft has called one of its 2000 systems a server, it has included a variety of utilities inside Windows that it also calls servers (e.g., Microsoft Transaction Server [MTS], Microsoft Message Server).

As an invited speaker to last week's International Conference on Software Quality (10ICSQ) hosted by the Software Division of the American Society for Quality in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, I had the good fortune to listen to Dr. Chuck Engle, whose topic is the title of this week's Advisor.

I spent a wonderful couple of hours with one of my favorite CIOs yesterday discussing the pros and cons of outsourcing. This is a person who over the last couple of years has pulled more and more of her organization's IT functions back into her shop.

Recently, my work has caused me to spend time in "hosting" or "co-location" facilities. Run by specialized companies such as Exodus, Genuity, Internap, and others, these facilities at first appear to be simply independently owned data centers built to capitalize on the IT outsourcing movement. That's what they are, in part.

Traditionally, there has been a rather sharp distinction between conventional enterprise applications and real-time applications. Regular applications were sometimes expected to provide answers to queries rather quickly, but everyone distinguished between "quick responses" and the kind of responses that were required by process control systems.

Cutter Consortium recently surveyed a group of companies to learn the details of their agreements with their application service providers (ASPs). To begin with, the data shows that only a small number of companies (14%) are currently using ASP services. However, within that group, companies are apparently paying close attention to service levels.

I've now been working in the computer field for 36 years -- longer than the majority of today's IT professionals have been alive -- and, for all practical purposes, Moore's Law has prevailed for my entire career. Every 18 months, according to the legendary hardware guru Gordon Moore, the processing power of a microchip doubles.

The traditional approach to project management recognizes that project objectives can change over time -- they are dynamic throughout the life of a project and are supposed to be changed as part of management control. However, two problems still persist in this area: (1) coping with radical changes, and (2) measuring success.

Software theorists have been talking about developing new software applications with reusable components for a long time. The idea is obvious: why develop new code when you can simply snap together already available components that provide the needed functionality. An analogy is usually made, claiming that the amazing successes of computer hardware depend on the existence of standards and hardware components.

In the October issue of the Cutter IT Journal, I wrote about the fact that " You Don't Always Get What You Want: But You Do Usually Get What You Ask For." As an addendum to that, here's another thought: if you don't know what you want (or don't make it clear), you probably won't get it!