Power consumption by servers is of increasing concern to business and IT management. This Intel article discusses the sources of power consumption as a function of server form factor and workload; power consumption of other components, power supplies and conversion, plus heat generation and cooling demands. How to estimate consumption and design factors affecting consumption are also covered.
The results of software estimation are important for stakeholders to take care of team allocation and budgeting. A widely prevalent technique to estimate in Agile has been Planning Poker, which is a consensus based. Does this way of estimating take too much time? Are there other methods which can be employed by experienced practitioners?
In a recent thread on the Scrum Development mailing list, Paul Battison asked whether his team should re-estimate completed stories after the sprint is done, so as to have the team's velocity reflect the actual effort that went into completing the stories.
The age old problem of software "estimation" has generated some interesting discussion lately in the agile community. J.B. Rainsberger, Arlo Belshee, Josh Kerievsky, David Anderson, and others ask the question "Are estimates really needed at all?"
Joel Spolsky recently posted an article about Evidence Based Scheduling. The post focuses on managing and identifying good estimates, in turn allowing the project manager to forecast the probability of delivering on a given date, adding a new method of measurement to the agile project manager's toolbox. InfoQ investigates the theory behind the practice, and its implementation in FogBugz 6.0.
