research on tdd at ms and ibm

I recently posted that I've revamped my thoughts on development methodologies, particularly around behavioral and test driven development. As we continue to rapidly hire at our San Francisco office (Ruby, Hadoop, Javascript, product and project managers), our commitment to modern development tools, technologies, and practices seems even more appropriate.

So, this research into TDD made for interesting reading. Synopsis for fans of short attention span theater:
* 15% increase in development time
* 40-90% drop in defect rate
* Most useful if integrated into project early
* Continuous testing key

congrats to aws

Lots of news in Amazon Web Services country.  EC2 now has a service level agreement and is officially out of beta.  More importantly, Amazon has announced that load balancing and automagic scaling is coming.  These are both big deals, although directly competitive with products other companies have built on top of AWS.  Interesting to watch how that will play out in the community.  

Autoscaling and load balancing are both keys to the work I'm doing at EMI.  In particular, as we consider different models for viewing and accessing data, capabilities -- an approach to access control central to Second Life over the last 2 years -- are looking like a likely solution to some of challenges we face.  EC2 with load balancing and scaling lends itself nicely to supporting caps.

Thanks, Amazon!

cooking development

I've already posted that Gordon Ramsay's "Kitchen Nightmares" has lessons for community and project development. Apparently, I'm not the only one to realize that it has lessons beyond cooking. Matt and David over on the 37 Signals blog both point out that Gordon's common lessons for restaurants of "local foods, cooked simply and well" support 37 Signal's software development philosophy/methodology of simple, small, and fast.