In the analysis about a recent survey on agile adoption (http://www.methodsandtools.com/dynpoll/oldpoll.php?Agile2), there is the fear that as agility is now becoming "trendy", we may see a number of organizations that will qualify now themselves as "agile", without implementing the essence of the agile software development practices. Has anybody see some signs of such situation?

You will find a lot of UML tools with many of them free on this url: http://www.softdevtools.com/modules/weblinks/viewcat.php?cid=54[^]

I have seen a recent survey on this topic (http://www.methodsandtools.com/dynpoll/oldpoll.php?Outsource). Close to 50% are outsourcing programming. What is the situation for your organisation?

A recent InfoWorld article publicized the blog post of S. Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, celebrating the fact that its Software Factories product had more than 100,000 downloads in six months. The InfoWorld article was rather negative on the technology as an analyst defined the Software Factory technology as “unimportant”. Initiatives like the software factories or the software product lines are often badly considered in the software development world. First, they are not really understood. In the InfoWorld article, the analyst is quoted comparing software factories and object-oriented programming. The industrial background of these approaches could seem also more difficult to transpose in the world of consumer or business applications development where software is not closely connected to devices. I think however that they provide a very interesting vision for projects that are interested in developing software for a multi-customers target or with a strong focus on product evolution.

A recent poll asked if programming standards are still in use in development organisations... and if they are controlled. None.........................20% Yes, but without control.....49% Yes, with control............31% Participants: 369 Source: Methods & Tools (http://www.methodsandtools.com) A majority of the participating organisations have coding standards... and a majority does not control them ;o) What is the situation at your location? Does this lack of control really hurt?

There is about this an interesting article "Going round and round and getting nowhere eXtremely fast? Another look at incremental and iterative development" that explain the differences between increment and iteration. http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=14

Methods & Tools is a free e-newsletter for software developers, testers and project managers. Summer 2006 issue's content: * Preventing Project Failure * Agile Adoption at British Telecom * Managing an Open Source Project 30 pages of software development knowledge. To download or read this issue go to http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php?summer06

The last Methods & Tools' poll examined how software configuration management (change management / version control) is performed by organisations. Is it an informal activity or performed with formal procedures that are validated by an automated tool? Question: How is software configuration management (change management / version control) performed at your location? No formal procedure and no tool 15% A formal procedure but no tool. 10% A tool but no formal procedure 26% A formal procedure and a tool 49% Participants: 346 As you can see a large majority of participants is using a tool, but the "managed" part of software configuration is less obvious if you consider the procedural part. Around 40% of participants have no formal procedure for software configuration. The need for a procedure depends on the size of the team and the impact of the developed system. You don't have the same requirements for medical device software than for a web site. The good results for the adoption of tools could also be explained by the good development and adoption of open source software configuration management tools like CVS or Subversion. There are some participants that have neither tools nor formal procedures, but this number should be considered with care as smaller software development structure have different needs as far as code sharing or versioning is concerned. Source: Methods and Tools, http://www.methodsandtools.com -- modified at 7:31 Wednesday 31st May, 2006

Methods & Tools is a free e-newsletter for software developers, testers and project managers. Spring 2006 issue's content: * Use Cases and Implementing Application Lifecycle Management Systems * Adopting an Agile Method * Continuous Integration: The Cornerstone of a Great Shop 30 pages of software development knowledge. To download or read this issue go to http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php?spring06

How is unit testing performed in organizations? Is it an informal activity that is done before integration if there is some time left after programming or is it the key element of the development effort? A recent poll examined the way unit testing is performed in software development organizations. Here are the results: Unit testing is not performed 13% Unit testing is informal 46% Unit tests cases are documented 11% Unit tests cases and their executions are documented 16% We use a Test Driven Development approach 14% Participants: 460 These results do not claim any scientific value, but they give some information on the usage of unit testing in organizations. Unit testing is still performed informally by a majority of participants. This is symptomatic of the small consideration that is given to the testing activities in most software development projects. When the pressure to deliver is big, testing informally makes it easier to execute poorly without being noticed as you don't have to provide evidence of your activity. It is however recognized that unit testing is an important building block of system quality and that it costs more to correct errors discovered in later project phases. Good documentation of unit tests allows also to improve maintenance when the original developer has left the project or the company, because it can limit the occurrence that the correction introduced a negative side-effect. At a time where agile approaches repeat the importance of unit testing, the glass can also be considered as half-empty. From this point of view, It is already encouraging to see that 41% of the participants are documenting their unit testing efforts. A Test Driven Development approach is used by 14% of the participants and 16% are documenting the execution of their unit test. These percentages are already important, as we know that documentation is not the preferred activity of software developers. They could be explained by the emergence of a wide range of open source unit testing frameworks in the xUnit family. They are the tools that should lead to more and more repeatable unit tests. Source: Methods & Tools (www.methodsandtools.com)

The Methods & Tools newsletter has just released in its archive section the article "GUI Testing Checklist" by Barry Dorgan. This article provides a checklist for testing GUI. http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=37

Methods & Tools is a free e-newsletter for software developers, testers and project managers. Winter 2005 issue's content: * Choosing and Managing the Ideal Test Team by Lloyd Roden This article presents how to build and manage efficient test team. It also introduces the "tester’s style analysis questionnaire" to discover the 4 types of tester that exist within organisations. * Risk Based Testing, Strategies for Prioritizing Tests against Deadlines by Hans Schaefer This article explains how to improve testing efficiency with risk evaluation. 37 pages of software development knowledge. To download or read this issue go to the PDF area of http://www.methodsandtools.com

In 1997, the Object Management Group (OMG) made the UML a standard modelling language for object-oriented applications. Since then, it has been seen as the dominant set of techniques for software analysis and design. So one might think that UML is widely adopted by software development organisations. In a recent poll, the Methods & Tools newsletter asked the following question: at what stage is the adoption of UML modelling techniques (use case, class, object, sequence diagrams) at your location? Not aware ......................................................7% Not using .....................................................18% Investigating .................................................12% Analysed and rejected ......................................... 4% Pilot projects .................................................4% Partial implementation (adoption of some UML techniques) ......25% Partial deployment (some projects are using UML) ..............14% Deployed (all new projects are using UML) .....................16% Participants: 427 Despite being the dominant techniques in the literature and being offered by a majority of modelling tools editors, UML is still ignored by some organisations. Nevertheless the adoption rate is very high. Around 50% of the participants told us that their organisation has adopted, totally or partially, the UML techniques. Around 16% are investigating it or conducting pilot project and only 4% of participants said that the UML techniques have been rejected after analysis. On the other hand, these results are not so surprising if you consider the lack of competition. Before the merge between OMT, Booch and Objectory, the object oriented modelling space saw the activity of other contributors like Coad, Yourdon or Schlaer & Mellor. I do not see this kind of competition today. This could also be explained by the fact that the OMG is providing a process for UML's evolution as an open standard. The current discussions are now more on the processes themselves with the emergence of the agile methods. In many agile approaches, the analysis and design phase should limit the usage of modelling techniques. Requirements are defined by a close relationship between users and developers working with a prototype-like mode created by short delivery iterations. Source: Methods & Tools, www.methodsandtools.com