Many familiar products, including email, instant messaging, search, and e-commerce sites, are actually implemented as services rather than PC-installed software. The shift to services now extends to everything from office productivity tools to utilities like storage, authentication, manageability, and application hosting. Engineers who want to build highly available services with a positive user experience face unique design, testing, and operational challenges. Ibrahim El Far and Venkat Narayanan discuss aspects of configurability, including the ability to turn off features quickly or redirect traffic that minimizes the impact of defects on the user experience. They discuss the importance of fault testing and explain why testing a service must happen everywhere from the workstation to the live site. Learn best practices in operations, including automated deployment, monitoring services, and service repairs.

Many managers look to formal techniques-requirements reviews, code inspection, and testing-to improve the quality of their software. While these techniques are valuable, they only evaluate the state of quality rather than improve it. The key is to create quality software in the first place. This can only be achieved by a change in management style. Jason Bryant proposes a set of simple and effective principles you can employ to produce high quality software. First, you must foster a culture where people are given the freedom, time, and resources to do the job correctly the first time. By embracing user centered and incremental development practices, you will go a long way toward ensuring accurate and timely software delivery. Focus on training your staff to become masters of their craft and invest equally in architecture, new features, and maintenance.

Some interpreters of history believe that the Industrial Age could not have happened without coffee and tea. That daily jolt of caffeine enabled workers to be more in control of their waking hours-not to mention killing the nasties in the drinking water. While the Industrial Age was all about staying awake and working long hours, cognitive psychologists tell us that working short cycles with frequent breaks is not only healthier but also more productive for knowledge workers. Linda Rising describes the costs of force fitting Industrial Age-read “plan-driven”- living into our now knowledge-based-read “agile”-world. Although choices at the personal level are best made by individuals, Linda offers specific suggestions for working in short cycles and the proper place for caffeine, naps, short breaks, and sleep. We have seen the benefits of agile processes in our organizations.

PMOs usually think they are out of business when agile rolls into town. But the reality is that the PMO can play a pivotal role in successful agile adoption in large organizations. Jean Tabaka shares her knowledge about how to engage your PMO for agile adoption by using three primary Lean Principles: "Eliminate Waste," "See the Whole," and "Amplify Learning." Jean gives examples of how PMO members can act as the "systems thinkers" for their organizations, pulling successes from the engineering group and instilling them into the entire enterprise. Learn the role of the PMO within agile-how the PMO pulls standards versus pushing them; how the PMO provides product backlog prioritization guidance regarding architecture and governance; how the PMO serves its agile community by facilitating release planning across teams; and how the PMO creates and maintains product councils.