David on IT Outsourcing in China: [urls] Measuring the ROI of Software Process Improvement

Saturday, September 18, 2004

Dateline: China

The following is a sampling of my top ten "urls" for the past couple/few weeks. By signing up with Furl (it's free), anyone can subscribe to an e-mail feed of ALL my urls (about 100-250 per week) -- AND limit by subject (e.g., ITO) and/or rating (e.g., articles rated "Very Good" or "Excellent"). It's also possible to receive new urls as an RSS feed.

All of the top ten are PDFs. Click on the link to read the abstract for each paper.

Note: Off to California for a couple of weeks. Probably no new, original postings until after the October national holiday in China. (I get a three week break from writing for this blog, but I'll still be writing columns for the AlwaysOn Network.)

Top Honors:

* Measuring the ROI of Software Process Improvement (relatively speaking, very popular among Furl viewers; highly accessible article with a lot of substance and pointers)

Other best new selections (in order of popularity as determined by Furl views, then alphabetically):

* A Framework for Off-The-Shelf Software Component Development and Maintenance Processes (this was THE most popular paper, although I liked the ROI article better; superb info, good guidelines, lots of food for thought)

* Agent-Based e-Supply Chain Decision Support (not as geeky as it sounds; lead author is with Carnegie Mellon's e-Supply Chain Management Laboratory & Institute for e-Commerce)

* B2B E-Commerce Stages of Growth: the Strategic Imperatives (a look at some case studies; provides some insights into B2B adoption and diffusion)

* Creating an Open Agent Environment for Context-Aware M-Commerce (from the Mobile Commerce Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon <no, this isn't necessarily CMU week>; I have a lot of doubts about this stuff, but it's worth firing a few neurons and giving it a spin)

* Development and Evaluation of Software Process Improvement Methods (Dissertation, 190 pp.) (superb overviews sprinkled with case studies; it was tough to choose between this dissertation and the ROI paper for top honors)

* Deriving a Diffusion Framework for Web-Based Shopping Systems (a bit of a technical flavor, but not too technical; puts e-shopping in a broader perspective, e.g., relative to EDI)

* Exploring Defect Causes in Products Developed by Virtual Teams (to all SIs developing a GDM - global delivery model - READ THIS!!; perhaps the most important paper among my top ten)

* Intelligent Support for Software Release Planning (a corporate technical paper describing a very useful software development management tool; see also the Release Planner (tm) home page)

* NaradaBrokering and its Applications (might be better than WebSphere; see also The NaradaBrokering Project at IU Community Grids Laboratory)

And my PERSONAL favorite:

> The Banality of Google (good for some laughs)

and many, many more ...

Cheers,

David Scott Lewis

President & Principal Analyst

IT E-Strategies, Inc.

Menlo Park, CA & Qingdao, China

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