"Software creators are gods..."

The morning kicks off with the standard, sub-standard breakfast. I'd forgotten how much I didn't enjoy it last year.

The first general session started with a local Taiko drum band playing, with David I joining in at the end. (This time, he wasn't hamming it up. He must have put some decent practice into it.) The stupid spotlights are still in my eyes.

The session was about Software Delivery Optimization (mmm...buzzwords), given by Boz Alloy, the head of their R&D department. The new goal is to not just have ALM, where development data can move from phase to phase, but to use that data to add "focus, precision, and control" to the lifecycle. Boz points out that we're like the cobbler's children. We write great tools to make other businesses work better, but we haven't had time/money/etc to write tools to optimize our own business.

They are rolling out three initiatives in parallel to provide more useful data to all stakeholders:

• Project Themis: Teamwork foundation for Analysts, Architects, Developers, and Testers.
• Project Hyperion: Visibility and predictability tools for Project Managers, IT, and Operations.
• Project Prometheus: "ERP for Software Delivery" Tools for managing external forces for Business Managers, CIO, CFO, and other executives.

What they hope to provide is a better dashboard for all the various roles in the project: "in the weeds" view for the developer all the way up to "pretty pie charts" for the CIO. At the end, they also announced the following soon-to-be-released products:

• JBuilder 2005
• StarTeam 2005
• CaliberRM 2005