Hi Folks

In many companies, resource utilization is considered an important measurement. The idea is that resources, whether they be machines or people should be occupied as close to 100% of the time as possible doing chargeable work. On the surface this looks pretty sensible. No point having people spending time doing things that the company doesn't make money from is there? The more time people spend working on chargeable tasks, the more money the company makes. Right?

Hi Folks

I had a discussion recently with a group of software architects about whether Architecture had a place in Agile development. This is an important (and at times hotly debated) topic so I'm going to expand on the discussion here.

In Lean, waste is anything that does not add value. The key to Lean is getting work flowing rapidly and this is done by identifying and eliminating sources of waste. Some sources of waste are obvious - tasks blocked through lack of feedback, rework due to misunderstood requirements and things like that. Some sources of waste though are not so obvious. Some are so insidious that we live with them all the time and assume they are an inevitable part of daily life.

To help us find and eliminate these sources of waste, we identify seven (because all good things come in sevens... like highly effective habits) types of waste. For software development these are -
1. Partially Done Work
2. Extra Processes
3. Extra Features
4. Task Switching
5. Waiting
6. Motion
7. Defects

Hi Folks

Over the last 2 days I have been taking part in the inaugural Scrum Australia conference. We have had Agile conferences for a while but this was the first specifically Scrum themed one held in Australia.

I recently checked back in on a team I had started up a while back. Over the months since I had set them free they had made a few modifications to the process and in doing so had fallen into one of the most common traps I have seen teams fall into - They had made it all about the developers.

My first inkling that there was something amiss came when one of the testers on that team approached me for some advice on how she could be more efficient in her testing. She felt she was falling behind. When I dug a little further it turns out the team had delegated the job of unit testing to the testers to "free up the devs". This was in addition to the acceptance test automation the testers were doing as well. The devs had also resisted any attempts to asist with testing so "they could be more efficient".

A typical enterprise data centre runs at a Power Usage Effectiveness of between 2 and 2.5. The PUE is the ratio between the total power for the facility and the amount of power that actually goes into powering the servers . A PUE of 2 means that means that for every watt that goes into powering the servers and other IT equipment, an extra watt goes into powering other things - cooling, lighting, backup power , etc. A 500W server in a typical data centre is actually drawing between 1000 and 1500W once you take into account all infrastructure needed to keep that server running.

With the number of data centres increasing every day, it is encouraging to see a newer breed of data centre being designed with much lower PUE figures. Google and Microsoft have new data centres with PUE figures of 1.5. A 500W server in that centre is only drawing 750W accounting for infrastructure. That's a big saving. The winner though is Facebook whose brand new data centre has a PUE of a staggering 1.07. That same 500W server in Facebook's data centre is only drawing 535W. Scale that up to hundreds of servers and the power savings are huge. What's more, Facebook have published the specs of the new centre under the Open Compute Project (http://opencompute.org/) so others can do the same. How does your data centre compare?

Over the last few weeks I have heard reports of a group calling themselves Earthwise Power Savers selling an energy efficiency product at local shopping centres. Their claims of 35% instant savings (plus unspecified health benefits) were a little too good to be true so I have done a little digging.

This is an expensive scam. What they are selling is known as a power factor correction device. This is a real device and it will correct your power factor but what it won't do is save you any money. Power factor correction is used on big industrial and commercial sites to compensate for the effect of switching on and off huge motors. Without getting technical, a bad power factor causes a large amount of electricity to be wasted as heat. An industrial site with a bad power factor can affect large sections of the grid so the utility companies fine those users if their power factors are bad. Domestic electricity meters can not sense power factor. Domestic users are not charged for power factor. This device can not save you money. All it can do is cost you several hundred dollars plus a visit from their "specially certified electrician" which will cost several hundred more.