TEAM Zarate Tarrani Notes From the Field

We want to share some papers that we've written and presentations that we've developed:

• Overview of configuration, change and release management that provides a one-page brief on each of the topics and their associated business and technical value.
• Life cycle quality gates, which shows what you should be measuring at each stage of a system's life cycle.
• Project deliverable, estimating and fixed-price contracting documents. These are presentations I gave when Linda and I worked for the now-defunct Inteliant Corporation, and some tools that I developed years ago for project estimating and resource costing. The tools have evolved over the years, undergoing frequent refinement over time. Their genesis was back when I was in the DoD contracting world.

The latest from the Object Management Group is their Model-Driven Architecture (MDA), which is based on OMG’s modeling standards: UML, the MOF and CWM. Get the overview document if you're interested in seeing what MDA is all about. OMG also has papers and a large number of presentations, available, which will allow you to drill down into the details of MDA. Along the same lines, A Standard for a Business Architecture Description is a document that I revisit often.

If you're interested in customer relationship management (CRM) I recommend a whitepaper titled, Developing Relationship Marketing Through the Implementation of Customer Relationship Management Technology because it addresses technical and business aspects of CRM.

Reality Test is a company that provides the people, equipment, and processes to test your systems and applications in real-life conditions. It's a great service and their site has knowledge resources that anyone involved in QA, release management or applications acceptance will find valuable. Among the resources are papers on The Business Case for Stress and Load Testing, 14 Situations where Stress and Load Testing will help your company, Cost-Based Disaster Recovery System Sizing and Disaster Recovery Plan Audits and Testing. Unlike many sites these papers are not self-serving marketing pap - they're useful and thought-provoking.

A closing note: the content in our other weblog, Postcards from the Revolution is growing. Give it a quick read and let us know what you think.