Loss of Agility?

In many software projects the business goals are poorly understood, in flux and hard to communicate. That’s where the agile/iterative approach comes in. Because you can quickly adapt to moving targets it’s much easier to deal with unstable requirements. Now consider a company that wants to put into place a new software system. If they were to start from scratch, they’d probably start playing around with a prototype, throw this at pilot-users and iteratively adapt according to feedback and a more mature requirements. What however, if they decide to build on top of a commercial platform and customise in-house? Then they need to decide for a commercial vendor that *fulfils their requirements* and that’s where the crux lies. How can they evaluate and decide for one or the other vendor when the requirements are everything but clear and stable? Furthermore, a decision is irreversible (more or less, after the licensing fee has been shelled out).

Effectively, you are forced to switch back to the good old “requirements-design-build-test-deploy-manage” approach for this step of the process. All agility is lost! As far as I can see, the only solution to somehow mitigate the problem lies in playing around with open source software before making the vendor-decision. This way you can establish some need-to-have requirements on the basis of which to pick the commercial vendor.

What do you think about this problem? Am I overlooking something, stretching the agile methodology too far? Can you see a solution consistent with the premises of agile development?

Also see Item 6. on the "Overly Long Guide to Being A Software Architect"

Batch File Rename By File Extension in Unix

Batch File Rename By File Extension in Unix

These are one-liners which batch rename files meeting a certain criteria under unix
These are very powerful command line tools. They have been used on FreeBSD, Linux, and MacOSX with success. But as with any batch file changing, you are advised to use them with caution. Backups are your friend!

# change .htm files to .html
for file in *.htm ; do mv $file `echo $file sed 's/\(.*\.\)htm/\1html/'` ; done

# change .html files to .htm
for file in *.html ; do mv $file `echo $file sed 's/\(.*\.\)html/\1htm/'` ; done

#change .html files to .shtml
for file in *.html ; do mv $file `echo $file sed 's/\(.*\.\)html/\1shtml/'` ; done

#change .html files to php
for file in *.html ; do mv $file `echo $file sed 's/\(.*\.\)html/\1php/'` ; done"

Sun[tm] ONE Message Queue 3.5 Enterprise Edition, Beta

Beta release of Sun MQ 3.5. The feature list describes lots of technical details, especially considering their clustering approach. eg info about every cluster node (broker) must be available to the client for load balancing and fail-over.

here are the release notes.

interesting:

• enhanced auto-reconnect
• broker memory management
• monitoring via special JMS destinations
• resource adapter for integration with j2ee server

Recovering a Lost BIOS Password

Google Answers: Recovering a Lost BIOS Password

really good answer -- bios passwords don't seem to offer a lot of protection!