A New York Times op-ed column by Thomas Friedman told of risk managers using a model to assess financial companies' net positions under different assumptions about mortgage interest rates and housing market factors. One of the parameters the managers were allowed to enter was year-over-year percentage growth in single-family home value. The model was built to accept only positive numbers for this variable. This is risk management as practiced in the 21st century.

Cloud computing and agile development are complementary concepts that have come together in myriad ways to aid in the rapid development and deployment of software to meet real business requirements. Both are currently in a state of evolution, which is creating interesting synergies as the enterprise IT environment continues to advance. The final result is likely to be new avenues of development and a range of new capabilities. In this Executive Report by Brian J. Dooley, we explore the development world ahead.

This year's survey studied software development teams at more than 100 software development organizations and collected the same type of data as in the survey six years ago. In this, the third and final Executive Update in the series comparing the results of the two surveys, we begin by examining how the role of team leader is changing and how projects are allocated to teams. We then examine the effect of these changes on the success of team performance, and we attempt to determine whether Weinberg's egoless software developer is becoming more of a reality.

If agility is about delivering customer value by being flexible, then how can adherence to a traditional scope, schedule, and cost plan be the best way to measure performance? It can't be. With pervasive change the norm, we can no longer "follow the plan with minimal changes." Instead, our focus needs to be on successfully adapting to inevitable changes. We need to move beyond the classic Iron Triangle measures to an Agile Triangle that focuses on Value, Quality, and Constraints. In this webinar, Cutter Agile Product & Project Management Practice Director Jim Highsmith will explore the necessity for and the rationale behind moving to this new set of agile performance measures.