QuickCounters

QuickCounters is a library that will make it easier to instrument your .Net code with performance counters. It still requires you to instrument the code through, which could make it quite messy.

Agile Google

Well, this blog says that Google represents good Agile, while other agile processes are bad agile. I agree with some points of the post, like if you have super developers the process does not help as much as if you have a mix of junior and medium level developers. But my personal experience does not confirm that no process is better than an agile process.

An eye-opening experience report by Mark Striebeck on Agile 2006 conference confirmed my suspicions. His area of work is Ad Words system, which is different from other stuff Google develops in that it is quite complex and requires a release cycle and commitments (as a B2B system). When he joined he found a few problems that can be attributed to a lack of a process. First of all the development was always late. Worse off, the developers did not know how late they are until the last moment. The scope creep was more than 30%. Mark was invited to add a process into the Ad Words development, to help solve these problems. Now, according to Steve Yegge this is like adding bad agile to good agile. Probably smart people at Google think differently.