I’m back with some updates

I am back to blogging. The run-up to the IBM Innovate Conference has been very time consuming. And I have just finished and published what is for me a major report for the Cutter Consortium (more on that below). I still have several writing projects underway, but with Innovate next week, I expect to start blogging again much more frequently, at least for a while.

The report for Cutter  fleshes out my ongoing conversation on Technical Liability as a extension of the technical debt metaphor. It can be found here. I am grateful to the Cutter leadership, especially Israel Gatt, for encouraging me to write the paper. The report builds on the initial idea introduced in my IBM blog. It goes into some detail on how technical liability can be calculated.

Recently,  I have been setting IBM Rational’s direction for instrumenting lean measures using some of the ideas in my previous blogs. The key idea is to provide instrumentation to support the implementation of the principles explained in Reinertsen’s The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development, the ‘must read’ of my previous post. In particular, I have been focused on surfacing the measures to manage highly variable product flow. This topic is close to my heart as it brings together two of my long-term career passions: team dynamics of software organizations and the practical application of the mathematics of business processes with high variability.

Last year, I was asked to come up with a core set of software operation measures. In response, I started the work on the product flow measures given the inherent variation of the software development. Now suddenly, as that work comes together, I have gotten several requests to start once again focusing on measuring the value delivered by software organizations, especially in the lean context.  So I will start a series of posts on that topic starting in the next posting. Please stay tuned.