Community Choice Awards

There's no slime nor trophies shaped like blimps like at the Kid's Choice Awards (I know this because I have a 9-year-old), but that program don't have a monopoly on honoring wacky categories such as "Worst Movie Kiss." SourceForge has announced the nomination period for its fourth annual Community Choice Awards is open, with prizes to be given out in 12 categories. Among them: "Best Project for Academia" and "Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything." There is no panel of judges to decide the winners, because "we want the open source community to tell us, first hand, what the most exciting projects are," said Ross Turk, the director of community for SourceForge. Projects do not have to be hosted on SourceForge to be eligible, and nominations will be accepted until May 29. The winners will be announced on July 23 at a party at the Agenda Lounge in San Jose, Calif, during the week of OSCON, the Open Source Conference. Should be quite the affair.
-- David Rubinstein

An Agile Process Maturity Model

I've begun reporting out the June 15 special report on Agile Development, and just got off the phone with IBM's Scott Ambler. He indicated the company has created an Agile Process Maturity Model, which will be detailed in a white paper due out in the next week or so. The maturity model defines three levels of agile process maturity. The lowest level is implementation by small, co-located teams using point tools for such tasks as continuous integration and testing, perhaps using Scrum or XP for collaboration. The next level demonstrates a more disciplined, full lifecycle approach and adds a level of governance. The third level is what Ambler called "disciplined agile at scale." Some critics have called this a mythical level, but Ambler details this in a very recent blog post. This links to a page on IBM's developerworks site, which had been down for maintenance, but check back.

Lining up more interviews now for the rest of this report.

-- David