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he SEI's Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), which was founded years ago and is currently the de facto standard, is no longer enough to properly evaluate software development capabilities and differentiate vendors.

Asserting that current methods for evaluating the capabilities of software vendors have become passe, the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and the Object Management Group (OMG) announced a partnership to sponsor the Consortium of IT Software Quality (CISQ), an industry-led initiative to address the measurement of critical IT application quality attributes.

“CISQ will enable us to benchmark the effectiveness of internal development, evaluate the quality of applications acquired from external sources, and predict the quality and cost of IT services to the business.”

For those teams that are new to Scrum, I do not recommend eliminating task estimates until you have established a stable velocity.

Once you have a stable velocity, however, you can use the concepts of story points and velocity to eliminate the need for task estimates in sprint planning. The time you used to spend estimating tasks can then be used more wisely to create working software.

By building on open source, we're able to avoid proprietary storage and networking products, alongside proprietary software.

Second, we announced the API's and file formats for Sun's Cloud will all be open, delivered under a Creative Commons License.

We created many iterations with absolutely no room for error and no slack time at all. CM in this case focused on the short project needs because the risk of our competition beating us was far greater than the risk of failing to take a longer term "product" view. In the end - we beat our competition to the market.

There were a number of times in which we discovered that the fix did not work as expected and we saved valuable time by rejecting the release earlier in the process. I had effectively partnered with the business representative and started getting a decidedly stronger "product" view while still helping us to meet our project deadlines.

You need to be well aware of both views and make the right choices from a business perspective.

The key is the device's ability to become whatever a user needs. Typically, the more a gizmo does, the worse it gets at each separate job. Less is always more. The iPhone, however, is arguably better at everything it does, because it does so much. Start with the App store, which is now packed with more than 25,000 applications. Now add the ability to sell subscriptions that regularly deliver fresh content, additional levels for games or new content, all announced Tuesday. Suddenly an iPhone app can be a digital bookstore, or a digital newspaper, or a game that doles out fresh content by the slice. More is more.

Apple will now let developers turn the iPhone into a control panel for practically any piece of electronics you can plug it into. That will allow users to, say, pair the phone with a set of speakers to turn the screen into a digital equalizer.

to turn visitors into users your homepage needs to make them feel the way they will feel when they use your service - happy, satisfied, excited. And this kind of trust begins with how the information is presented on your site

The page design and content offering is based on simplicity. The product claims to be easy and the page is, in fact, easy to consume and digest. This inspires trust.

using big design statements to direct your users to a call for action is key for converting visitors to users

there are too many copy-cats constrained by Web 2.0 conventions: status updating, comments, friend lists, fans, gradient icons, and feeds.

Geisha Tokyo Entertainment makes something called Dennoh Figure ARis or Cyber Figure Alice. Max described it as an "augmented reality doll." It's a Web cam that's built into a doll. You hook it to your computer and software adds animation to the video.

the most efficient bioteams use one-way broadcasts and save two-way communications (which take more time) for when they’re really needed.

A bioteam is an organizational structure in which peers share power and responsibility and each member of the team is a both a leader and a follower. The structure is modeled after a fluid leadership structure found in nature.

Some scientists think the leadership rotation also encourages the birds to communicate more effectively.