Excellent blogs!

Agile development, software defects, good requirements gathering, all forms of software testing as well as application of agile techniques all lead to the same set of principles. There used to be a time when "quality, speed and cost - choose any two" used to be the state of the art in software development or any other endeavour.

The 21st century will wake up to new ways of doing things which are different from the mid-20th century, Harvard, GM/Alfred Sloan/McNamara approaches.

The new set of management principles will be based on Lean Six Sigma, Toyota Production System and other very successful approaches applied everyday to many an endeavor. The older approaches advocate functional silos, PUSH based planning (you forecast, do production planning and ship out having inventories on hand). The newer approaches - the one DELL or Toyota would be using is have the lines so flexible that you do not produce that which is not already sold. You do PULL based planning and execution.

I would personally invest in companies in SAP and Oracle since within ten years they would be revamping their entire supply chain software all over again to accommodate the PULL model - upgrades and lots of new revenues!

What they advocate is "Quality, Speed and Cost - You can have all three if you really think about what you are doing and effect improvements at the local level to get huge global gains.

Agile techniques in software will thrive even more if they realize that the key to effective software development is communication. Not mechanical pair programming rituals or similar magical voodoo practices, although essentially what they achieve is good communication. Communication and Iteration are what help agile techniques get to your goals that much sooner. Quality, speed and cost - you can have all three!