I thought I'd point out a couple of new articles that are worthy of your time. Alistair Cockburn argues in Crosstalk that software engineering has aspects in common with manufacturing and why it is important that we learn from them. Meanwhile, over at CM Crossroads Brad Appleton lists off his Lean Metrics for an Agile CM Environment.

Cockburn's article is particularly interesting and innovative as he chooses to think of "decisions" in knowledge work as "parts" (or inventory) in manufacturing. In Agile Management I defined invnetory as the collection of customer-valued functions (or ideas) that were in-progress in the system. In MSF, the team at Microsoft, defined it as "knowledge" - the concept that 100% knowledge equated to releasable code, while 0.001% would represent the glint in the eye of the business owner when a concept for a new piece of software is first born. Cockburn's definition is a refinement on the MSF notion and a significant innovation that will allow further work on the topic. I fully agree with Alistair's observation that every line of code represents a "decision." I've stated this before when I observed that every developer is an executive in reference to Peter Drucker's writings on knowledge work.  Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Lean, Alistair+Cockburn, Brad+Appleton