Die meisten Wissenschaftler sind Wissenschaftler, weil sie Angst vor dem Leben haben. Es ist wundervoll, in der Wissenschaft erfinderisch zu sein, in einem Rahmen, in dem man sich nicht mit Leuten herumärgern und unter Beziehungen leiden muss. Es ist wundervoll da draußen in der aseptischen Welt, in der es keinen Schmerz gibt. Doch irgendwann muss man in sein Inneres schauen und die Angst besiegen. Dafür gibt es keine Programme und auch keine besonders guten Theorien.

John W. Backus, 1924-2007

Since I am interested in agile software development from the perspective of a software developer, I've asked myself what would be the best contract model for project delivery. On the one hand, Times and Materials is the best model for taking advantage if a customer does not know his requirements in detail or if his business is changing very quickly, so that he wants to setup new requirements or change existing ones during the implementation. Of course, there is the prerequisite, that the customer has to trust the supplier, as there is no inherent relationship between the chargeable effort and the deliverable coming out at the end of the day. On the other hand, there is no budget limit - using this model requires discipline from both, the customer and the supplier, to stay focused to the real business needs and to not waste too much time and money.

But what other contract models could make sense to pull out the best of an agile approach? Yesterday I found a good overview when reading the web site of Alistair Cockburn. He has been collecting ideas people have for contracts on agile projects.

As a student, I have been eager to run an own root server in the real internet. In 2004, together with some fellow students I started a project to run a root server and to have a self-configured MTA, Web server, Jabber server with transports and so on.

As time goes by there are new priorities: A job, new topics, more private life, less time. And especially less time to care for a root server with lots of servers running on it and to update them frequently. As a consequence, I decided to leave the root server, and running everything, mail traffic, wikis, websites and blogs on hosted services.

This blog is the replacement for http://weblog.alenz.org. And while publishing this indroductory article, I'm hoping to write more often. :-)