If there is one concept that is central to the Agile development process, it's probably Continuous Build. Although small projects can rely on manual builds, automation is the key to using Agile for ever larger projects.

If you're into Open Source, as many Agile developers are, one continuous build tool of choice is CruiseControl from ThoughtWorks.

IBM expanding its backing for Eclipse with the release of an open source application lifecycle management (ALM) platform serving its Rational tools.

IBM is today expected to throw open code to Jazz, a two-year internal IBM project geared towards improving collaboration between application development team members working in distributed environments.

Developing the Future Developing The Future is an annual report from Microsoft and various industry partners, which looks at the UK software development industry in the context of the UK economy as a whole.

The 2007 report is sponsored by City University, London; the British Computer Society, and Intellect (the trade association for the UK hi-tech industry); as well as Microsoft itself.

SAP has doled out a handful of details on A1S, its eagerly anticipated mid-market on-demand suite, while promising to be better than Salesforce.com.

After months of teasing SAP watchers at numerous trade shows with screen shots and little else, SAP today revealed A1S would be "closer" to SAP's existing All-In-One suite, rather than Business One or SAP CRM ondemand.

The majority of European IT professionals say that a failure to finish projects on time would not pose a risk to their job. Under a quarter of IT workers in the US felt safe enough to say the same.

After three years gestation, the UK's Office of Government Commerce (OGC) yesterday gave birth to ITIL version 3. ITIL's friends promptly held a launch party in London to celebrate.

Interview TIBCO's Stefan Farestam talks with Reg Developer about the ground rules of SOA governance.

Whatever you think of Microsoft, it's clear that it produces excellent developer tools, which are extremely popular with its customers. We're talking about Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) here, and its next two incarnations, codenamed Orcas and Rosario (see Gavin Clarke's article here).

The DSDM Consortium has set itself the ambitious aim of covering all types of project management with its revamped development framework launched last week. The framework has been rebranded under the name DSDM Atern and replaces the existing DSDM version 4.2 - although the Consortium describes the change as an evolutionary upgrade. Current DSDM 4.2 users will be provided with appropriate migration guidelines.

After being disgraced by his failure to finally destroy the career of his project manager victim, Screwpole’s nephew Mugwort attempted to redeem himself by undermining the project manager’s recruitment process and leave him with a team of inept slackers and sociopaths.

Typically for Mugwort, things did not go totally to plan and his victim somehow managed to recruit a handful of competent experts, along with the desired buffoons and work-dodgers. Now Mugwort has to find ways to undermine the development of this mixed team…

Analysis Later today (Thursday) Microsoft will release its figures for the past quarter, and there’s more than a good chance that financially speaking, things will be pretty much okay. But no better than that.

Sapphire SAP has called time on SOA and outlined changes to NetWeaver for broad use of composite applications, deeper integration with Microsoft, and Web 2.0.

Chief executive Henning Kagermann rallied 15,000 delegates at SAP's customer and partner conference today. He claimed SOA would be largely delivered in 2007 and that NetWeaver and mySAP ERP 2005 are poised for mass adoption, with NetWeaver uptake more than doubling in the next year. SAP expects 4,000 customers on NetWeaver during the next 12 months.

Virtualization specialist SWsoft has crafted a cut-rate version of its flagship software, hoping to get new users to try out its technology.

In 2006, Amazon.com launched several web services aimed at developers: the Simple Storage Service (S3) offering unlimited internet storage, the Simple Queue Service for reliable message delivery, and the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which lets developer create and manage virtual server instances programmatically.

The trouble with some legacy applications is that businesses dare not get rid of them. That is fine as long as the platforms on which they run continue to be at least supported - and ideally updated - by the manufacturers.

Measuring what users are up to, particularly in any web-based business application where the users can be anybody "out there", is getting to be one of the more important aspects of managing the performance of business systems.

So, it seems that the early adopters of the move towards rentable hosted services are not the bleeding edge, state-of-the-art businesses that the likes of Sun Microsystems had hoped to target with its Grid computing service. Instead, it has been applications developers that have latched on to the technology, particularly as a means of testing new developments on large installations without actually having to buy them.

Despite being left in a position of near-victory, Screwpole’s calamitous nephew Mugwort somehow failed to lead his project manager’s payment engine project into disaster.

Developers will feature big in SugarCRM's plan to penetrate the enterprise, through greater customization capabilities and scalability for its software.

The hosted and on-site customer relationship management (CRM) start-up promises a major upgrade, version 5.0, this summer. Due in beta next month, SugarCRM 5.0 will scale to implementations of 5,000 seats, up from roughly 2,000.

Confused about how the emerging identity standards and systems fit together and which to work with? You're not alone. There's a lot of talk – and quite a few demos – of interoperable identity systems, but how do you know how well they really fit together?

VSLive Microsoft has added cross-browser support to its application lifecycle platform, in a further sign that Internet Explorer's hold on developers is slowly loosening.

London was recently host to a conference showcasing CMMI process improvement. Primarily sponsored by the consultancy Lamri, the conference was held on 19-20 March.

To some extent, it's a marketing exercise, but the presence of representatives from the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon and truly independent consultants such as Marilyn Bush and others, means it provides real information content.

Two specifications that may have some impact on rationalising the practical realities of service development and building within SOA have now reached the point where they are to go forward to OASIS, the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, as the first step towards becoming accepted standards.

My colleague Joyce Becknell and I recently had a very interesting conversation with Martin Griss, dean of education at Carnegie Mellon College in Silicon Valley.

I've long believed that when you start a project you worry about the technology and whether it works. but in the post-mortem afterwards, you find that most of the real issues were to do with project management. Even technology failure can be mitigated, if the project is managed properly. Sometimes the right course is to cancel something based on promises your vendor can't deliver against - before inflicting it on the business.

Of course, you can't always criticise the project management, because project managers sometimes have political influence and power – so it's then safer to blame the technology. Sometimes, even the project review - post-mortem - is discouraged, in case it gets too negative...

Which is why I've been following Mr Screwpole's lessons in project management failure here with some interest and posted a comment here, concerning how well his metaphor worked in the real world. Screwpole sent his lowly amanuensis, Phil Rice, to put me right.

Microsoft has admitted that the latest update to its Windows Genuine Advantage program will phone back to Redmond even if the user clicks cancel.

Interview For years the Adobe Photoshop team has been trying to get away from the traditional death march to a more agile development style. For its CS3 release, it made the jump, with the help of VP Dave Story. The result? More weekends off, and a third fewer bugs to fix. Mary Branscombe quizzed co-architect Russell Williams on how they did it.

Always be careful what you wish for. I liked Stuart Okin when he was chief security officer for Microsoft UK and thought he did a lot for Microsoft's credibility in this area, but I'm afraid I occasionally laughed at Microsoft for putting a developer type in charge of security, instead of a superannuated spook as everyone else does.

Well, I'm sorry now, as at Microsoft's Architect Insight conference (you can find the programme here) I saw the pukka ex-FBI agent now in charge (Ed Gibson) – and he's actually a bit scary. Ed Gibson is an entertaining speaker, but he sure plays the FBI card and "protect the little girls" hard - and actually wears a suit (so Microsoft really is the new IBM).

Run Book is what IT data centre managers understand as the Application Run Book. This is the IT department "to do" list of problems to fix and the projects to deliver. This is a long and complex list, and keeping everything in sync, well co-ordinated, and efficiently using IT resources is a nightmare.

Oracle is ending its brief acquisition lull with one of its largest software deals. The database giant will buy Hyperion Solutions, also an Oracle competitor in the business intelligence market and an important partner of SAP, for $3.3bn, or $52 a share - a handsome 21 per cent premium for stockholders.

Uncle Screwpole, the devious master manipulator of IT projects, has promised his nephew Mugwort that he will reveal the secrets of time estimation…

To: Mugwort

From: Uncle Screwpole

One of the executives credited with helping stabilize BEA Systems is quitting as the company continues to iron out troubling kinks in its global sales operations.

Google will try to chill Microsoft’s post-Office launch glow today, adding Docs & Spreadsheets to its apps suite and pitching a pay per seat version of the bundle to corporate customers.

Google will charge companies, or individuals, $50 a seat per year for its Google Apps Premier Edition suite. Likes its free stable mate, PE now contains Google Docs & Spreadsheets, as well as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and the Google customizable Start Page feature. Unlike Microsoft, Google seems to have a working currency converter, with UK punters being charged £26 a seat.

Comment If the fuss currently being made about Dubbya's attempt to save energy by making the US go to Daylight Saving Time a fortnight early reminds me of anything, it's the hype we had to endure eight years ago about the Millennium Bug.

IBM's appetite for acquiring software companies shows no signs of diminishing. Last year, the company conservatively spent $3.6bn, adding 12 companies or just their assets to its $18bn middleware business during 2006.

Given the recent abundance of mergers and acquisitions among the mid-market ERP vendors, IT directors managing an ERP system may feel uncertain about the future of their incumbent system. Yet it is critical to be able to assure the board the product won't disappear - or at least warn them if it's time to switch vendors.