Can a large organization adopt agile approaches to software development when the organization holds the notion that not all projects should be agile? In other words, can there be a mix of waterfall-type projects and agile projects in the same organization? The short answer is yes, however there is a cost that must be paid for this coexistence.

In transitioning to agile, most companies gradually transition a few teams at a time, learning from their successes and mistakes and applying the new knowledge to the rollout of new agile teams. This process can take months or years, depending on the size of the organization and the stability of management and agile champions.

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Virtualization is a long established technology in the server world. It has been used for decades as an enabler for platform consolidation. In the recent years, the technology has also gained new public interest due to its availability for Desktop PC platforms. The fact that it can provide strong isolation between applications and that this level of isolation can be achieved with only a very small layer of trusted code has also raised interest from the security related field of applications.

The possibility to integrate multiple independent subsystems in a single physical machine could also prove beneficial for many safety-critical applications.However, in addition to the spatial isolation that virtualization readily provides, most of these applications also require some level of temporal determinism: Each subsystem typically interacts with a technical component and, consequently, it has to keep up with that component’s timing properties.

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The European Union has decided to designate this year 2009 as the year “of the creativity and the innovation” and for this reason, throughout year 2009, we will have the occasion to participate in conferences, events and another type of directed initiatives, all of them organized to emphasize the importance of innovating to evolve.

In addition to this, the European Union will harness measures, at European, national, regional and local level, with the aim of promoting the creativity as an innovation factor.

Visit the official Web of the European year of the innovation and the creativity