I have met hundreds of organizations that are trying to improve their way-of-working. What I have found most interesting is that the vast majority of these organizations are looking for the solution outside of the company. They are either benchmarking with other similar organizations or running after the latest fashion in the industry. However the perceived benefits are not always there and the answer is usually much closer than they know.

Good industry standards are one thing, but many things that are good for a specific company are not necessarily transferable to another company with another background and culture.

In reality many solutions can be found inside the company. There are top-performers, top performing teams and projects in all companies and if we could repeat the good behavior from those individuals and teams, the organization could improve tremendously. However we need a structured way to capture that behavior so that it could be easily understood, distributed and reused; this is where using Practices makes perfect sense. Practices is a way to effectively describe the Essentials of Things to do, Things to Produce and the Competencies needed for a specific area of concern.

What good practices do you have in “your belly button”?

Is the fact that it is hidden, the reason why so many software projects fail or run over time and budget? Do decision makers realize how much money could be saved if they just cared a little more?

Well, we care! We know that project deadlines can be met, that project budgets can be kept and that the customer can receive what they expected. You just have to be smart and care a little more. Ivar Jacobson International supports an organization called Swedsoft (www.swedsoft.se) whose primary goal is to care about the software industry, the hidden software industry.

Do you care?

Use Cases meet Visual Studio 2010

Use case development and management in Visual Studio is about to change with the upcoming launch of  Visual Studio 2010.  IJI has developed a process template for agile Use case driven development that helps developers adopt Use cases within a Microsoft development environment in an efficient way. Tracking Use cases as requirements items is one thing, but understanding how to develop good Use cases in a light weight fashion is another and this is IJI’s strength and the benefit of IJI collaborating with Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 launch.

This new process template will give development teams the power to develop new Use cases, report on them and view the complete visual story as the use case develops. The result? A more powerful toolset.

You will be available to download the process template from MSDN at the time of launch. Stay tuned as I’ll definitely provide updates as we get closer to launch. But in the meantime, I’d like to hear your thoughts on this topic and how you see your team developing use cases with Visual Studio 2010.

You can also read Software Development Times writer David Worthington's recent January 18 article about Visual Studio's ecosystem of partners.