Protectionism No Way to Counter Offshoring, Bush
Says
IDG News Service (03/03/06) Ribeiro, John
President Bush is touting the benefits of globalization during his visit
to India. Although some trade groups in the United States have been
critical of the trend of shipping technology-related jobs overseas, Bush
said taking a protectionist stance to outsourcing would not be the correct
response. "We don't fear competition," Bush told the gathering in
Hyderabad. And during a news conference in Delhi, Bush said he supports
raising the H-1B visa limit so that more engineers, scientists, and
physicists from India could come to the United States. The technology
industry says the current limit of 65,000 H-1B visas a year is not enough.
In an address to students at a business school in Hyderabad, Bush said
American entrepreneurs and small businesses have access to a market that
has approximately 300 million stable, middle-class families. At the same
time, U.S. technology companies have flocked to India, and the country now
serves as the site of many of their software development, support, and
business process outsourcing operations.
ACM has issued a comprehensive report entitled "Globalization and
Offshoring of Software--A Report of the ACM Job Migration Task Force." To
view this report in its entirety, visit
http://www.acm.org/globalizationreport
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House Republicans Push 'Innovation' Agenda
IDG News Service (03/01/06) Gross, Grant
The technology industry is lauding Republican leaders in the House for
pledging to support initiatives that will allow the nation to remain at the
forefront of innovation in the years to come. During a press conference
this week, leaders such as House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) touted an
"innovation" agenda, prompting praise from the Information Technology
Industry Council. Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Lamar Smith (R-Texas),
who lead the House Republican High Tech Working Group, introduced the
Innovation and Competitiveness Act, which would encourage more students to
focus on math and science by offering educational incentives, and includes
similar inducements for IT investment by the health care industry. "This
group has not just talked the talk, it has walked the walk when it comes to
getting the job done for the high tech community and the American people,"
said Hastert. Other party leaders said more funding is needed for the
National Science Foundation and other government research agencies.
Hewlett-Packard welcomed the provision in the legislation that would
provide a research and development tax credit. However, the innovation
plan does not address some important areas, such as the "digital divide" in
broadband, according to House Democratic Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi
(D-Calif.).
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Is DC the Power to Solve Heat Problems?
CNet (03/02/06) Shankland, Stephen
In the search for new solutions to increasing power consumption and heat
emission in data centers, some companies are investigating the possibility
of converting alternating current to direct. Rackable Systems is leading
the DC charge, but server providers such as IBM and Sun are skeptical of
the solution, though they admit that electrical efficiency is a major
problem. DC proponents claim that it would help the efficiency of the
power supply, improving waste and component failure. "It keeps the units
considerably cooler within the chassis themselves and saves us somewhere
between 10 and 20 percent over the AC-powered alternatives," said the
University of Florida's Charles Taylor, who recently installed a Rackable
server cluster. Rackable claims that its DC method can save electric costs
by 30 percent a month, and that reliability improves by up to 27 percent.
Sun counters that far from being more efficient, DC power is actually
wasteful. In DC, electrons only travel one way, whereas they move back and
forth in AC, which, due to its ability to travel over lightweight wires,
makes AC better suited for long distances. Once AC is at a building,
however, DC is a more viable possibility. The problem of loose joints
among copper bus bars plagues the distribution of DC throughout a data
center, though a more recent approach applies DC power through a bus bar
installed within a single rack. Processors that produce increasing amounts
of heat are packed more closely together in today's data centers, and the
continued demand for increased computational ability is only exacerbating
the energy issue. DC power helps take the heat from power supplies and
their cooling fans away from the server cooling intakes. Hewlett-Packard
has incorporated DC into its blade servers, though IBM's Tim Dougherty,
director of blade strategy, believes that DC simply moves the problem of
power conversions from one area of the computer room to another.
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Online Amateurs Crack Nazi Codes
BBC News (03/02/06) Blenford, Adam
Software powered by grid computing has cracked one of the German ciphers
from World War II that stumped both Allied code breakers during the war and
cryptography enthusiasts since the publication of the ciphers in 1995.
Encoded in 1942 by an updated German Enigma machine, encrypted German
ciphers led to major Allied losses in the North Atlantic. Stefan Krah, a
German violinist with a yen for open-source software and cryptography,
began the renewed quest to crack the German codes out of "basic human
curiosity," despite their relative lack of historical significance.
Drawing on the years of work by veteran amateur cryptographers, Krah wrote
a code-breaking program that he published on the Internet, drawing the
interest of around 45 users who volunteered their machines for the project.
The project now runs on 2,500 independent machines. It took just over a
month to decode the first of the three ciphers, in which a German submarine
reported that it was submerging and relayed the last recorded enemy
position. The Enigma machine employed an array of rotors and electrical
contents to uniquely encode messages, confounding the celebrated Allied
cryptographers at Bletchley Park in the UK. The transmissions were
scrambled further as plugboards swapped pairs of letters as the message was
being encoded. Krah's software combines algorithms with raw computing
power to reproduce the possibilities of the plugboard swaps, while
systematically wading through the rotor setting combinations.
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MIT to Bring the Market Into the Lab
Financial Times (03/03/06) P. 9; Knight, Rebecca
Frank Moss, the new director of MIT's Media Lab, intends to draw heavily
on his experience in the business sector to enhance the lab's partnership
with industry. Unlike most research facilities that raise money through
grants and specific corporate-commissioned projects, the Media Lab collects
60 percent of its annual budget from corporate sponsors, but many companies
have lately been taking their research funding overseas. In response, Moss
has made corporate interaction the lab's top priority, inviting officials
from sponsor corporations to meet-and-greet sessions with the lab's faculty
and students where they can see presentations of the lab's latest projects.
Moss also intends to include sponsors in the development process, which
could mean partnering with companies to develop prototypes, or taking a
more commercial approach to the lab's development, bringing the research
closer to market viability. The lab's relationship with industry reminds
Moss of his days selling software, when he would have to convince CIOs and
executives that the investment was justified. While he will devote
considerable energy to courting industry, Moss says that the lab will not
completely subordinate itself to corporate interests, noting that the Media
Lab only has value if it stays on the cutting edge. Mindful of the
increased competition for funding from facilities such as Stanford's Media
X, Moss emphasizes the need for internal cooperation among different groups
at MIT to enhance the value of the school as an entity, rather than just
the Media Lab. "The real competition is not between me and Media X at
Stanford, the real competition is between MIT and Stanford," he says. Moss
has no intentions of renewing the Media Lab's overseas initiatives.
Education and aging will be primary areas of focus for the lab under Moss'
direction, as well as improving the human-computer interface.
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Tech Groups Urge Congress to Keep Net Neutrality
IDG News Service (03/02/06) Gross, Grant
Legislation banning discrimination by broadband providers against rival
services transmitted over their networks should be considered by Congress,
according to a letter various tech groups sent to the House Energy and
Commerce committee on Wednesday. Sixty-four tech companies, trade groups,
and consumer proponents issued the letter in response to recent reports
that the committee was about to strip a communications bill of so-called
net neutrality provisions. The letter's signatories include Amazon.com,
EarthLink, eBay, Match.com, Microsoft, Pulver.com, Tivo, Yahoo!, the
Consumer Federation of America, Free Press, and Public Knowledge.
"We...believe that unless Congress acts, the Internet is at risk of losing
the openness that has made it an engine for phenomenal social and economic
growth," reads the letter. "We are writing to urge that Congress take
steps now to preserve this fundamental underpinning of the Internet and to
assure the Internet remains a platform open to innovation and progress."
According to the letter, consumers rather than network providers should
determine what Web services and sites they use. Verizon, Comcast, AT&T,
and other major broadband providers claim a net neutrality law is
unnecessary, given a dearth of proof that a problem exists, and suggest
that a net neutrality provision would be one of the first major Internet
regulations. The communications bill the committee is considering includes
a simplified plan for video franchising that would permit large telecom
firms to enter the video market and rapidly get approval to roll out
services designed to compete with cable TV.
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Ideas on Display at Microsoft's TechFest
CNet (03/01/06) Fried, Ina
Researchers at Microsoft's TechFest, an intra-company forum for pitching
the latest design projects, are encouraged to present ideas that in some
circles could be seen as competing with each other or redundant, such as
two methods for optimizing Bluetooth capabilities to secure cell-phone
communications. At Microsoft, however, having multiple researchers working
on similar projects encourages collaboration and accelerates the time it
takes for an idea to become a reality. Microsoft's Bill Buxton also notes
that the spirit of innovation at TechFest is uplifting, as workers
throughout the company can see that there is more to their work than simply
fixing bugs on the latest version of Windows. As competition from Apple
and Google intensifies, Microsoft is relying more heavily on its growing
research unit, which has identified search and digital media technologies
as areas of particular interest. When Microsoft jumped into the search
game, it was years behind, and the efforts of its research unit ensured
that MSN could at least become competitive, and it has since gone on to
explore desktop search and other new search applications. Microsoft's
Henrique Malvar, director of its largest research lab, notes that a good
innovator, like a baseball hitter, will fail more times than he succeeds.
If his average is too high, it suggests to Malvar that he is not pushing
the limits enough. Some research projects demonstrated at TechFest
included Pinpoint, a program that sends email alerts to the user when a
friend is nearby, and an inkable digital calendar designed to modernize the
handwritten home calendar.
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Software to Bring Order to Information Chaos
IST Results (03/01/06)
The IST-funded PARMENIDES program, a comprehensive system for rapidly
gathering, analyzing, and creating new information out of chaotic data that
only humans had been able to analyze before, has made significant advances
the murky field of applying computer analysis to unstructured, real-world
data. The system was tested in three applications in the field: querying
information from advertisements and business wire services to identify
demand for new drugs in the biotech industry; compiling terrorist dossiers;
and assessing the relationship between food, weight, and health. "Our
greatest contribution was to create a framework for integrating structured
and unstructured information," said project coordinator Anthony
Theodoulidis. Most of the world's information is presented as unstructured
text, such as newspapers and letters, that is not in any database and
requires human intervention to analyze. Once the project is refined, it
will be able to analyze text or other unstructured information, and include
it in a database, essentially teaching computers how to read. The best
results from the testing phase came from the Greek Ministry of Defense,
which used the system to identify patterns and make connections about
terrorist activity that would elude normal human analysis. The system also
monitors trends and changes over time, and helps to uncover new information
out of old data. Ontologies are the key to the system, describing the
terminologies with significance for a given domain. Three ontologies
analyzed databases, unstructured texts, and the two together as data sets.
The PARMENIDES project also developed tools to automate the creation of
ontologies, potentially enabling ontologies to exchange information from
different datasets, and even improving the average user's Web search
experience.
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Smart Homes Control Heat, AC
Red Herring (02/25/06)
At the University of California's recent research symposium, architecture
graduate student Therese Peffer showcased a project to introduce technology
into homes that would allow consumers to monitor how much electricity they
are using per hour. The smart home project would use sensors to help
homeowners keep a tighter control over their energy consumption. "Right
now, there is no feedback except when the utility bills come at the end of
the month," said Peffer. The symposium saw many projects that involved
collaboration between departments, and many drew funding from both public
and private organizations. The partnership between universities and
industry has never been more important to advancing research, said Richard
Newton, dean of Berkeley's College of Engineering, noting the diminution of
major corporate research facilities, such as HP Labs and Bell Labs. In one
project at the Berkeley Institute of Design, researchers are converting
mobile devices into educational tools for children in rural India who
frequently take time away from school to work in the fields. The mobile
learning program is developing education games and speech recognition
software for handsets. Another Berkeley project is creating a sensor
network for elder care that detects when a patient falls or is afflicted
with a serious ailment. The researchers are testing the sensors, each
roughly the size of a deck of cards, at a retirement home. In their
completed stage, the sensors would enable independent living, transmitting
alerts to relatives or a hospital through wireless technologies such as
Bluetooth, though false alarms are one of the major challenges that the
system must overcome.
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Software Promises More Efficient Design Process
Purdue University News (02/28/06) Venere, Emil
A team of mechanical engineers at Purdue University has developed a
software system that figures to improve the design efficiency of parts for
a host of devices, from cars to computers, by offering rapid design
evaluation and optimization. Design and analysis, currently independent
processes, are brought together in the software, streamlining the
time-consuming process of finite-element analysis by allowing designers and
analysts to work concurrently on the same part, rather than waiting until
the CAD process is completed to begin analysis. The software, which
contains around 35,000 lines of Java code, is detailed in a paper written
by mechanical engineering professor Ganesh Subbarayan and doctoral student
Xuefeng Zhang, who developed the program. To produce the ideal shape for a
structure, the program finds the lowest sustainable weight through a
process called topology optimization. Finite modeling breaks complex
objects down to their most basic geometric parts, creating algebraic
equations that the computer can work through. The researchers' program
takes an incremental approach to finite modeling, only restructuring the
elements of the part that were changed, rather than recreating the entire
geometry. "Now, the same CAD software or similar CAD-friendly software
will be able to do the analysis, and in a much more efficient manner
because there is no remeshing," said Subbarayan, who has been working on
the project since 1998. The program, already in use by researchers at
Purdue to develop new materials on a microscopic scale, figures to improve
the longevity of circuit boards by optimizing the shape of solder
droplets.
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Bioinformatics Pioneer David Haussler to Receive Carnegie
Mellon University's Prestigious Dickson Prize in Science
AScribe Newswire (02/27/06)
Carnegie Mellon University will award David Haussler, professor of
biomolecular engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz
(UCSC), with its prestigious Dickson Prize in Science on March 9, 2006.
The award honors scientists who have contributed greatly to the research
community. In addition to producing groundbreaking results in
bioinformatics, Haussler, director of the Center for Biomolecular Science
and Engineering at UCSC, has achieved similar success in the field of
computational learning theory. Haussler, who won the 2003 Association of
Computing Machinery/American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
Allen Newell Award, also helped forge cooperative working relationships
between computer scientists and molecular biologists. A fellow of AAAI and
the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Haussler is
currently involved in an effort to use the genomes of living mammals to
reconstruct by computer the entire genome of the common ancestor of all
placental mammals. Haussler, who will receive $50,000, will deliver a
lecture during the ceremony.
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3D Plasma Shapes Created in Thin Air
New Scientist (02/27/06) Hambling, David
Researchers from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and
Technology (AIST) in Tokyo, Burton, and Keio University have demonstrated a
laser system that is able to display 3D images in thin air. Potential
applications of the technology could result in it being used to create
emergency distress signals or temporary road signals, according to
officials from Burton. "We believe this technology may eventually be used
in applications ranging from pyrotechnics to outdoor advertising," adds a
spokesman from AIST. The laser display makes use of an ionization effect,
and a certain intensity in the laser pulse is needed to break air down into
glowing plasma, in order for the laser beam to become visible to the human
eye. In the demonstration, an infra-red laser was used to produce a
hundred flashpoints per second, projected between about two and three
meters from the unit, in a space of about a cubic meter. Solid shapes
could be sketched due to the use of a high-speed linear motor for
controlling a lens, and by extension the focal point of the laser in 3D.
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China Splits From the Internet? Probably Not
Computer Business Review (03/01/06) Murphy, Kevin
The Chinese Ministry of Information announced that on March 1, 2006, a
number of new Chinese-language second-level domains would be added to the
Internet so that "Internet users don't have to surf the Web via the servers
under the management of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers of the United States." If this is true, then Internet experts'
fears have come true about rival DNS roots servers causing worldwide
incompatibility. The U.N. World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)
has been debating how to handle the DNS root server Pandora's Box for
years, and in November 2005 issued a policy conclusion stating that
reliance on the ICANN-run root should continue. However, because of
translation difficulties in the Chinese announcement, and also China's PR
interests in making anti-U.S. news splashes, it is possible China has not
set up a separate root. Since March 2005, China has routed some Chinese
specialty domains behind the scenes through .cn, making it seem like a host
of .cn-based domain names float independently from the ICANN-run root. In
this case, ISPs resolve domains to .cn behind the scenes, and private
company New.net used the same tactic to sell its non-approved domains such
as .shop and .sport. "As far as I can tell, what they're doing is using
DNS forwarders, much like ISPs do," says John Klensin, former chief of the
Internet Architecture Board. ICANN currently has no comment, but believes
the news is not as bad as the announcement makes it seem.
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Endless Energy Is Harvesting's Promise
EE Times (02/27/06)No. 1412, P. 1; Brown, Chappell
Energy harvesting, the technique of gleaning power from extreme
environments, has begun to attract the interest of commercial developers
for the potential it offers for creating self-sustaining electronic
systems, weaning the consumer electronics industry away from its dependence
on the battery. Energy can be drawn from the environment from vibration,
strain, inertia, and magnetism, as well as heat and light. For instance,
strain and vibration can translate directly into electricity through the
application of piezoelectric materials. Replacing batteries is a lofty
goal, and researchers have yet to produce a device that rivals its low cost
and reliability. Dust Networks founder and CTO Kris Pister sees the
convergence of sensing, computation, and power following the pace of
Moore's Law and eventually scaling down to a theoretical zero in size.
While at the University of California, Berkeley, Pister focused on reducing
the power consumption of circuits, and has turned his attention to software
since founding Dust Networks. Pister sees economic potential in energy
harvesting techniques, such as photovoltaic cells, that could extend the
life of the battery, rather than attempting to replace it altogether.
Photovoltaics is the most advanced energy harvesting technique, and has the
advantages of low cost and abundant availability. In addition to
photovoltaic technologies, MicroStrain is developing piezoelectric
materials to monitor the structural integrity of a building through the use
of strain sensors. "At the end of the day, wireless networks will always
be hampered by the need to change batteries," said MicroStrain's Michael
Robinson. "Harvesting energy is the only way to avoid that." The
implementation of energy harvesting techniques is predicated on the
low-power design of electronics, which is beginning to appear, particularly
in microprocessors. Leakage remains a central problem for new parallel
architectures, however, posing a critical challenge to semiconductor
designers.
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TIA Lives On
National Journal (02/25/06) Vol. 38, No. 8, P. 66; Harris, Shane
Despite a congressional mandate putting an end to its activities, the
Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, collectively a government
anti-terrorism initiative that relied on extensive data mining of personal
records and government databases, continued on under different names after
having been transferred from the Pentagon to another organization. The
Advanced Research and Development Agency (ARDA) has assumed two of the most
critical elements of the TIA program, including the Information Awareness
Prototype System, the architectural framework that links together numerous
data mining tools. TIA owes its origins to Hicks & Associates' Brian
Sharkey and former National Security Advisor John Poindexter, who pitched
the idea to officials at the Defense Department in the wake of the Sept. 11
attacks. DARPA agreed to host the project, with Poindexter at the helm
until protests over his role in the Iran-Contra scandal forced his
resignation. It remains unclear if the program will continue under ARDA,
though documents have revealed that it had full funding at least until
September 2004. Another component of the original TIA program that lived
on after it was halted by pressure from privacy groups, Genoa II,
concentrated on creating technologies that policymakers and analysts could
use to anticipate terrorist attacks. Although the link between the TIA
initiatives and President Bush's domestic surveillance program remains
unsubstantiated, the early-warning system that TIA was designed to create
is the specific type that the NSA is using to eavesdrop on phone calls and
emails.
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Career Watch: Lucy Sanders
Computerworld (02/27/06) P. 45; Hoffman, Thomas
While the Labor Department projects that technology-related jobs will
increase by more than 2 million by 2012, the proportion of women in IT has
dropped 18.5 percent in the last eight years. Cisco has partnered with the
National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) to help reverse
this trend. NCWIT CEO Lucy Sanders spoke in a recent interview about Cisco
and NCWIT's attempts to boost opportunities and awareness for women in
technology. Women hold about 29 percent of the U.S. technology jobs,
though that number is declining, while the enrollment of both men and women
in computer science programs in colleges and universities has fallen 18
percent, and just 15 percent of high school students are taking the
computer science advanced placement test. Sanders says that NCWIT and
Cisco are working actively to boost awareness by promoting the viability of
technology as a career to parents and educators, attempting to dispel the
widely held myths that a career in technology equates to a life of social
isolation and meaninglessness. "I know firsthand that it's an exciting and
creative and socially relevant career," said Sanders. CIOs at the world's
best companies report directly to the CEO, according to the Hackett Group,
noting that the elevation of technology to a top strategic priority is a
key factor separating the average company from the world-class company.
The Hackett Group reports that IT departments are managed centrally at 67
percent of world-class companies, where managers and staffers are also far
more likely to have advanced degrees than their counterparts at typical
companies. While the CIO serves on the primary management committee in
just 56 percent of average companies, the CIO has a seat at the table in
100 percent of world-class companies.
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Wireless Sensor Networking Software: The Next
Generation
Sensors (02/06) Vol. 23, No. 2, P. 23; Hobbs, Kristi
The wider adoption of wireless sensor networks hinges on the incorporation
of three additional functions--node intelligence and automation, node
aggregation, and enterprise integration--within next-generation wireless
sensor networking software. A certain degree of node configuration figures
into nearly all wireless sensor vendors' software offerings: Almost every
software package shows a graph of real-time sensor data, while some feature
an interface that lets the user export data to a spreadsheet for offline
analysis; but these tools are missing certain advantages many users
perceive as critical to the usefulness of wireless sensor networks.
Next-generation software needs to support node intelligence and automation
through intuitive and easy-to-use tools that enable the rapid acquisition
and local storage of data, as well as local analysis so that higher-power
gateway nodes can compile and process data from lower-power nodes and pass
minimal information. Current code management software can accommodate a
few dozen nodes at most, but the next generation of software must manage
nodes on a vaster scale by aggregating them into groups and assigning the
same function to an entire group at a time. Easy integration of sensor
networks with the rest of the enterprise is also a must, and fulfilling
this need requires a technique for passing data directly among a
heterogeneous network of wireless sensors and business systems that employ
diverse networking protocols, in addition to a data logging and offline
analysis methodology. Online analysis capabilities must subsequently be
supported.
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Sweet Predictability
Software Development (02/06) Vol. 14, No. 2, P. 30; Humphrey, Watts
The quality of software and the productivity of developers can be tracked
via the Personal Software Process (PSP), which can also facilitate accurate
forecasts of success, writes Carnegie Mellon University Software
Engineering Institute Fellow Watts Humphrey. The PSP requires all
development team members to measure and track their personal work, with a
particular emphasis on finding and correcting defects early on through
personal design and code reviews. Conducting inspections via the Team
Software Process (TSP) afterward can reveal almost all defects prior to
system-level testing, according to Humphrey. The reason why so many
organizations have not adopted this methodology is twofold: Most software
groups lack the data to formulate solid quality plans, and the dearth of
PSP data leaves developers without any idea of how many defects they inject
or how much it costs to spot and fix those defects. Useful quality
measures include defect-removal yield and cost of quality, with the former
constituting the portion of defects removed in a phase, and the latter
comprising the assessment of failure, appraisal, and prevention costs.
Humphrey sets the effective review rate between the optimal rate of about
100 lines of code (LOC) per hour and the upper limit of 200 LOC per hour,
and recommends that developers track their personal review performance to
ascertain the highest review rate that still supports a consistent review
yield of at least 70 percent. Process quality can be measured against the
ratios of design to coding time, design review to design time, code review
to coding time, and review time to development time. The PSP approach also
involves using personal plans and historical data as a work guide,
beginning with attempts to achieve a PQI value of 1.0 and planning design
review according to the PSP Design Review Script and code review according
to the PSP Code Review Script.
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